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"America can never win a war with Venezuela" No, but they'll win all the battles.
by yakbarber 9mo ago
"America can never win a war with Venezuela"
No, but they'll win all the battles.
- Qem 9mo agoThere is a poor track record on war against jungle covered countries whose names start with V.
- hirvi74 9mo agoWhat 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.
- jalapenos 9mo agoIt'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.
- clanky 9mo ago> 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.
- deleted 9mo ago[deleted]
- jonway 9mo agoThat is really, really distilling the entire decades-long indochina conflict into one weekend, wow lol.
- woooooo 9mo agoOne weekend, 7 years and Nixon's entire presidency before we actually withdrew.
- dragonwriter 9mo ago> 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 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.
- nradov 9mo agoThere 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.
- PearlRiver 9mo agoThis 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?