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Comment by yakbarber | Hacker News Reader

"America can never win a war with Venezuela"

No, but they'll win all the battles.

There is a poor track record on war against jungle covered countries whose names start with V.

It's widely accepted that the US lost in Vietnam due not to military defeat, but from the clever Tet Offensive - where they successfully influenced US politics via US journalism, to cause them to simply cease fighting.

Whether they should have bothered in the first place though, given how corrupt and dysfunctional the regime in the south was, is an open moral question.

> It's widely accepted that the US lost in Vietnam due not to military defeat, but from the clever Tet Offensive - where they successfully influenced US politics via US journalism, to cause them to simply cease fighting.

Yes, that's called "losing a war," and no serious strategist pretends that politics is not one of the key theaters (if not the key theater) of conflict.

Yes, that's literally how essentially every war ends; some combination of factors causes one side to stop fighting rather than continuing the pay the price in blood and treasure that fighting demands.

There's probably a few somewhere that end because the losing side doesn't give up but fights to the last person, but that's very much not the norm.

There are plenty of examples from history where the winners simply wiped out the losers. In ancient times the usual practice was to kill all the men, take the women and children as slaves, and destroy all the cultural artifacts. Probably thousands of societies or cultures worldwide were utterly erased in that way, maybe leaving only some shards of pottery. We are perhaps a little more civilized about such things now, and show restraint for political or moral purposes rather than setting out to commit genocide.

That is really, really distilling the entire decades-long indochina conflict into one weekend, wow lol.

One weekend, 7 years and Nixon's entire presidency before we actually withdrew.

What do you mean by poor track record? I can infer you are talking about the Vietnam War, and that is why I am curious. From a military point of view, the US did not lose a single battle of any significance during the entirety of a Vietnam War.

How does a country lose a war without losing any major battles? On the homefront first.

This is what astounds me. Why waste all the money and blood on a frankly failed state like Venezuela that was always a basket case. What's next Haiti?

To divert the attention from other issues.

Oil! It's always oil

It's because Venezuela has lots of oil and gold, and the money (and blood) won't be "wasted" for the small sliver of people who benefit from stealing it.

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