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Notes -
To play Devil's Advocate for a bit, I'm not sure the answer should be zero either. The historical parallel that comes to mind is the difference in long-term outcome between WWI and WWII. Germany lost both, but at the end of the first hadn't really suffered any major damage to its infrastructure or civilian population, since the front lines were mostly beyond their borders. Belgium and parts of France certainly got hit hard, but I can't help but look at how the second war weaved its narrative around the aftermath of the first: Versailles was unfair, but wasn't even fully enforced, and a generation later Germans were thinking not that the lesson to take away was that simultaneously fighting Russia, France, and the UK was doomed to failure, but that "this time, it'll be different." But the lesson from the second, even before the country was split among occupying forces for several generations, was (loosely) "nothing we could have won would have been worth it."
I can't help but think that to at least some extent, history teaches the costs of the war need to be at least plausibly fairly distributed to discourage revanchism. And I think that could easily be applied to the Culture War: yes, that absolutely sucks for the victims, but ensuring a long-term stable peace is plausibly cheaper than the short term concerns here. Giving one's opponent, after they've inflicted a serious beating, a chance to tap out before getting hit back seems like a recipe for convincing enough people that it might be worth it to try again later.
On the other hand, I don't wholly endorse this view: I generally side with Asimov that "Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent." But I don't think the idea is completely meritless either.
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