A small country winning the war against post WW2 USA seems like it would be a bit of a plot hole.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Party_(1968_film)#Racial_c...
As always it starts with the uniquely explicitly race-based slavery, and from there you can draw a direct line to non-white people being systemically "othered" and denied basic human decency one way or another (to put it mildly).
In this particular case, the history of Hollywood to deny non-white actors leading roles, but giving white actors roles where they play racist stereotypes of everyone else. Aside from the issues on an individual level that also means "non-white" cultures don't get properly represented, but depicted according to whatever racist stereotype the white actors/writers have about a culture they usually don't actually know much about.
So yeah, I am not from the US but I get it. Which again makes the fact that Peter Sellers' apparently hit a positive chord an interesting exception.
Well sure. Most cultural quirks make sense in the context of that culture's history. All part of the rich tapestry of life, as long as they don't try to impose them on other cultures.
> Which again makes the fact that Peter Sellers' apparently hit a positive chord an interesting exception.
GP was saying it was unpopular with their American-born relations, no?
True
"If a small country declared war on us, we could easily bomb them back into the iron age."
Putin probably thought the same about Ukraine.
Military objectives were achieved in Afghanistan, but not in Korea and Vietnam. And based on Clausewitz: "War is politics by other means" And our politics changed....
> Putin probably thought the same about Ukraine.
I doubt, as Ukraine is far from being a small country. It is the second largest European country (counting Russia as an European country, as is common in geography). (he most likely had other miscalculations leading to the current situation)
Hard disagree on Korea. South Korea is a hell of an ally, very inconvenient for the PRC.
The objective of the US once they pushed back the initial invasion in the Korean War was to destroy the DPRK, force communism out of Korea, and unify the country. They failed. The war became a stalemate once China got directly involved.
If Vietnam becomes a stalwart ally of the US over the next 20 years that won’t mean the Vietnam War was a success just because the US ended up eventually having a useful interest in the region.
The objective of the war was to prevent the spread of communism. That goal was achieved.
With all the post-WW2 wars, we've gone in as a dominant power, as the aggressor, to a country that is far smaller and less developed. In terms of casualties, they've been even more lopsided victories than WW2. The second Iraq war killed about half a million Iraqis and displaced about 1.8M, vs. < 1000 Americans killed, for a kill ratio of ~500:1. But what does it even mean to achieve victory here? We go in as a bully and ruin our world reputation. The average American sees zero benefit from killing Iraqis; it just means higher oil prices, larger government debt, more inflation, reduced civil liberties, and a lack of focus on domestic problems (...which may be the point). Defense contractors make out like a bandit, and the executive branch gets to consolidate power (...which, again, may be the point), but there isn't room to grow the way there was after WW2.
I think eventual loss in Ukraine will be last nail in the coffin of US military reputation.
Same way that russia is not fighting a war but commencing special military operation.
US is doing it with both hands tied behind their back but it will make defeat no less devastating.
In reality US is fighting their penultimate war right now if it ends in a loss.
> what was considered to be the 2nd or 3rd strongest army on the planet..
That was summarily debunked about two weeks into the conflict. And noone but russians believes it today.
Where'd those Bradleys come from, then? Zero troops yes, but the US has absolutely shipped a ton of military hardware to Ukraine.
Ukraine would absolutely fold without the inflow of NATO military hardware, that's the crux of Russia's strategy for winning - hope it can undermine Western support for a Ukraine war, and then crush Ukraine once they're on their own. That's the entire reason why Russia blocked gas exports to Europe - they lost a lot of gas profits forcing the EU to choose between supporting Ukraine or having Russian gas for the winter.
The US itself isn't fighting in the war, but they're undeniably a key participant in it. With military hardware and training and intel support and money.
And yes, those details matter in geopolitics, a lot.
I'll grant that for the Bradley, but Patriot batteries are in rather short supply.
US is simply not a party to Ukraine’s war; they are supplying equipment in a very minimal capacity.
Russia started it. US didn't run away soon and fast enough. Now the fight is on. If it ends with Russia winning nobody will listen to US whining "but we didn't really fight". Nobody will care. Neither opponents, nor allies. Especially not China.
This might be taught in US schools, but outside the US we have a rather different take on how the Vietnam war ended - the US-backed government fell and the North Vietnamese government took over the rest of the country. And we learned that the Korean war ended in some kind of stalemate, where the government structures on both sides exist largely intact today.
“If they would waste all that blood and treasure for a small country in east Asia, imagine what they would do if tanks rolled into Moscow?!”
The cultural part can't be understated. By the 1960's young men world wide would rather be a rock star banging groupies than fight for the revolution. There is a reason the Khmer Rouge killed the pop stars in Cambodia.
Notable Japan, Korea, Taiwan and Germany became wealthy by aligning closely to the US. Where commies and non aligned became poorer.
Least impressive was the CIA's skullduggery and Kissinger's Real Politic.
I'm arguing that this is the wrong litmus test for judging the winners of war, because war is an ineffective way of achieving regime change in the first place. Even in cases where it looks like a country "wins" a war by "defeating" their opponents, they usually collapse from the inside and then the true winners are those that either take advantage of the chaos to seize power, or stay out of the war entirely. The allies were victorious in WW1 - yet the government they wanted stayed in power for barely 10 years, and then we got Hitler and WW2. Russia was part of the victorious allies in WW1, but the country collapsed and the communists took over. The communists were the official victors of the Vietnam war, but Vietnam is now one of the most capitalist countries on earth, and so politically they were defeated by economics and not war.
Also, the Korean war was clearly a victory for the US; we intended to defend SK and prevent the spread of Communism, and that’s what happened.
Nonsense. A clear victory would be if South Korea held its frontline near the Chinese border, instead of being pushed back to the 38th parallel.
The Korean war was a stalemate. It wasn't a loss, but it wasn't a win.
I'm also not aware of the existing Vietnamese government falling (depends on which one you consider the existing one but it was not the government the U.S. wanted to fall that fell). The country resisted a superior invader like it did in the past (China) and I'm pretty sure most people would consider Vietnam the winner of the war (if there's a winner in war).
North Vietnam conquered South Vietnam after we withdrew. It was in no way a victory for the United States. Afghanistan was arguably pretty similar, although we did install a new government while we were there.
Germany and Japan, on the other hand, surrendered unconditionally. Saying that Germany and Japan were “bombed back into the Stone Age” is a wild exaggeration, though — strategic bombing famously failed to cripple Germany’s wartime industrial production. (Strategic bombing in general is overrated.)
Your number for US deaths in Iraq is low by at least a factor of four.
You may wish to learn the actual histories of these wars before trying to draw big conclusions.
Vietnam ended in US defeat, and French defeat before that.
Afghanistan ended with US / NATO defeat and the Taliban taking over the country.
The Korean War isn't over yet technically, all we have there is a cease fire. Stalemate, nobody surrendered.
The US won the second Gulf War, Panama and some smaller stuff I am too lazy to look up.
The “clear and internationally acknowledged” criteria for a 'loss' is being caught on camera while the last soldiers evacuate and the enemy takes over.
So technically Vietnam and Afghanistan are losses. Because of the video's.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Korean_conflict
https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.cnn.com/cnn/2021/12/30/asia...
edit: to be clear, you don't dispute that the taliban has retaken the country from US forces right?
They’re inherently different and the only way to “””win”””(which is a loaded term with wars against insurgents. We accomplished important strategic goals in Vietnam before leaving the country to self determine) is to resort to tactics employed by folks like The Butcher did in Cuba.
The US won zero strategic goals, Vietnam was reunited by force under the communist North. The US goal was to orevent exactly that. Nice spin so, calling Vietnam a defacto strategic victory for the US.
And Afghanistan, seriously? Before, anti-Talobam forces controlled at least parts of zue country. Nowy the Taliban are in full controll after they over ran Kabul following a hasty retreat of NATO forces from the country, that is as clear cut a loss as it gets. Had the US led coalition left after Bin-Laden was killed, one could have declared a victory. By staying and tuening the whole affaire into a foreign occupation without clearly defined goals, the US-led coalition could only loose. And they did.
That’s completely false. A large strategic goal of USA in Vietnam was to show strategic partners and allies the extent to which USA was willing to go for its commitments.
> And Afghanistan, seriously?
I have no idea what you’re asking. Vietnam and Afghanistan were simply not real wars in the traditional “win-loss” sense for USA; Afghanistan moreso than Vietnam.
The government of North & South Vietnam that I'm speaking of was France.
Acknowledged on the undercount of U.S. casualties in Iraq. It doesn't change my conclusion, though.
There's a sibling comment by delecti that's making the point that I'm driving at: what is the goal of war? Is it regime change? Is it to sell arms? Is it to kill people? If it's regime change, war in general is a remarkably ineffective way of doing that - it's pretty rare that the victorious powers get the government they actually want, otherwise we would never have had to fight WW2. If it's killing people or feeding the military-industrial complex, the U.S. was pretty good at that in all the wars listed.
Incidentally, Vietnam is currently one of the most capitalist countries on Earth. So politically, the communists were defeated. All we had to do was let them govern the country for 15 years and everybody realized they didn't want communism.
> The U.S. "won" Korea, Iraq, Vietnam, and Afghanistan in the same sense that they "won" WW2 - those countries were bombed back into the stone age and the existing governments fell.
Now you are saying:
> The government of North & South Korea that I'm speaking of was Japan.
> The government of North & South Vietnam that I'm speaking of was France.
Which completely contradicts what you said before, and is even more wrong.
Japan was firebombed pretty ruthlessly. McNamara openly stated that he would have been tried as a war criminal had the US lost the war. Here is a list of 67 Japanese cities that were firebombed with their destruction % and their US size equivalent:
http://www.ditext.com/japan/napalm.html#google_vignette
Source: The Fog of War (Documentary)
I guess this all depends on one’s definition “bombed back into the Stone Age”. I’m sure descendants of those that lived in Dresden might argue that they, in fact, were indiscriminately bombed to the point of ruin.
Guess technically, 'stone age' is hyperbole. They didn't literally have to climb back up through a bronze age and steal age again.
But point stands, they were severely crippled.
Well, yeah. And it's not exactly a technical term. Don't get me wrong, the strategic bombing was very destructive and killed a lot of people. The way I interpret the phrase is that bombing a country "back to the stone age" means destroying their industrial production. And strategic bombing didn't do that. Germany and Japan's GDPs did not crater; their production of military hardware increased through 1944. I'm sure the bombing kept it from increasing more, but that's not what the phrase implies. When the Allied armies entered Germany in 1944 their opponents were armed with guns and tanks, not bows and spears.
Also note. There were 4x as many deaths from suicide. If we really cared about soldiers, this would be the number one story every day.
https://watson.brown.edu/costsofwar/costs/human/military/kil...
Over 7,000 U.S. service members and over 8,000 contractors have died in the post-9/11 wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, and elsewhere.
Over 30,177 U.S. service members and veterans of the post-9/11 wars have died by suicide. Coalition partners have died in large numbers: approximately 177,000 uniformed Afghans, Pakistanis, Iraqis, and Syrian allies have died as of November 2019.
Do you think that wars are not political? A political win is a military win.
Korea was a proxy war between the US and China (i.e. Communism). The US wanted a foothold on the mainland and to put a demonstration of the virtues of Capitalist Economics in the Communists' back yard, both of which it got in the form of South Korea. If the US hadn't been involved, "Democratic People's Republic of Korea" (i.e. North Korea) would have rolled south with China's backing and "Korea" would have been a single communist country.
Without China's involvement the opposite would have happened. China was well aware of this and did not want a capitalist economy sharing a border with it -- Berlin Wall kind of problems -- so they weren't going to stop supporting North Korea.
Which is the kind of situation that makes unconditional military victory close to impossible. China just keeps giving North Korea assistance, most of the casualties are North Koreans rather than Chinese and the North Korean leadership won't surrender as long as they have China's backing because it's not a democracy so staying in power is the only thing their leaders care about. "Unconditional victory" would effectively have to be a military victory over China.
At the time the US had nuclear weapons and China didn't, but China had half a billion in population even then, and they too were a non-democracy whose leaders cared more about staying in power than dead citizens. The US could have won militarily if they were willing to kill several hundred million people. It's probably best that they weren't.
And it was largely the same for the other proxy wars. Unconditional victory would require victory over not just the nominal enemy but the ones propping them up. Hence Cold War.
Could they really? Would the nuclear-armed Soviet Union idly stand by and watch US commit nuclear holocaust against it's close neighbour? They wouldn't. Would US allies back them in a war that turned into genocide? Unlikely.
So no, they probably could not have done that because they would not risk escalation into WW3 where most allies abandon USA.
I feel you're overlooking the critical fact that after the allies won WW2, Nazis didn't control Germany.
Whereas the Taliban remains in control of Afghanistan. To describe that as a US win doesn't really seem accurate.
The US did print a big 'Mission Accomplished' banner though, so I agree the folks who started the war do claim it was a victory.
Of course, Iraq also had no WMDs before the war, so I'm not sure the episode proves much about America's ability to win.
"winning" the war means accomplishing your political objectives. Those objectives may change as the war goes on, and in the case of Korea, the objective became "keep South Korea free from North Korean domination." That was achieved.
It was unclear to MacArthur and he assumed it was "destroy North Korea, whatever it takes." That became NOT the US objective, when it became clear that China stood in the way of it.
In Vietnam the objectives were never clearly laid out, but "keep South Vietnam free from North Vietnam domination" was pretty clearly it. Thus, we lost.
Your other points are wrong: the first Iraq war's objective was to eject Iraq from Kuwait. Perhaps that goal was insufficient, but that was the goal the military undertook, and achieved.
https://www.amazon.com/Strategy-Critical-Analysis-Vietnam-Wa...
The US isn't conventionally, even in the US. viewed as the victor in Korea (war is still in progress, with a long but imperfectly observed ceasefire), Vietnam (one of the few wars the US generally acknowledges as an unambiguous defeat, thought right wingers will often say that we won “militarily” and lost “politically” or some other cope), or Afghanistan (recently added to the list alongside Vietnam).
Also, the prewar opposing in Korea, Vietnam. Iraq (1991), and Afghanistan did not fall, and in each case remained in power after the war (and in Vietnam and Afghanistan, the primary opposing government ended up in control of more territory as a result of the war, controlling undivided a country which it had controlled only a divided—formally in Vietnam’s case, de facto for the Taliban in Afghanistan—fraction of before the war.)
> With all the post-WW2 wars, we've gone in as a dominant power, as the aggressor
No, we haven't. Not even in a loose sense of “aggressor” in several of them.
If you go by deaths, USA did very well in Vietnam. However, with wars of insurgency people like The Butcher showed that far more deaths are required to win than is palatable
I was going to respond to each of your points carefully, but since you mentioned that Iraq’s leadership remained in power after 1991 as some kind of rebuttal, I am not certain I should. Indeed, overthrowing Iraq’s government was not a war aim there.
Yes, if war was a game where the victory condition was killing the most people... well, actually, the Khmer Rouge would have won the wars in the region, by a wide margin.
But its not, so “yeah but we killed more people than our immediate enemy” is... irrelevant, mostly. Killing people is a means, not an ends, in war (I mean, except when your war aim is extermination, but that's not the general case.)
> but since you mentioned that Iraq’s leadership remained in power after 1991 as some kind of rebuttal, I am not certain I should. Indeed, overthrowing Iraq’s government was not a war aim there.
I’m not the one that said a unifying feature of the post-WW2 wars was that the US destroyed the pre-existing government and thereby won, when that is very much nor a characteristic of those wars in general, or the specific cited examples originally provided (leaving off Iraq I, it wasn't a feature of Korea, Vietnam, or Afghanistan, specifically cited as examples upthread, either.)
I would call the first Iraq war a success - the US achieved it's aims of driving Iraq out of Kuwait, destruction of the Iraq military, a UN resolution approving the attack, and wide support.
Contrast this to the second Iraq war and Afghanistan, where I agree the US was perceived as a bully. It bullied Pakistan ("You're with us or against us", war threats) into supporting the invasion of Afghanistan, and the invasion of Iraq was illegal, with France prepared to veto any UN resolution trying to legitimize the war.
Bingo! There would be no Taliban if USA made Afghanistan an unincorporated territory like Puerto Rico, handed out passports and rebuilt infrastructure / governance.
There was a plan for what to bomb, but no plan for what to build. Basically a huge waste of time.