A) We've come too far for Obama to lose Iraq and/or Afghanistan and our military is stretched very thin, so the troops are necessary. B) There are still threats in this world, including China, Russia, N. Korea and Iran. So someone has to step up to the plate and maintain a strong military. Europe will not do it, so we must.
I don't know that I agree with that. We need a strong enough military to defend the USA. I don't see that we "need" to be fighting everybody else's battles. (One thing for sure... we can't afford it.) Trying to be "police to the world" will bring us down economically just as it did the Romans.
That just might be the lamest excuse I've ever heard. Or read. He didn't plan it right. The result was stop-loss. Period the end.
Only to a degree, really. Halliburton could be a more obvious beneficiary than arms companies per se this time around. For one thing the nature of this war may have shifted military budgets away from big ticket items like destroyers or fighter planes, since boots on the ground were the most important resource after the initial fireworks. But culturally, we can imagine that wartime politicians may be more surrounded by military folks, and the military folks are connected to the contractors, and if the whole thing is nepotistic enough and profitable enough then maybe it could push attitudes closer to an acceptance of war as a "necessary" evil. That said I'm not sure you'd find less war among nations without arms industries. In a developed nation the idea is that war creates a transfer of wealth as the sovereign borrows to pay the munitions companies. But in Angola... So it would be nice to see some empirical evidence one way or another.