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PaperclipPerfector  2mo ago (text post)   29559 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of August 26, 2024

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For all it's overwhelming firepower, the U.S. seems to have very few clean victories in the post-WWII error.

The Gulf War is of course the notable exception. But that success was responsible for our subsequent debacles in the Middle East so it has to be counted as a strategic failure even so.

Nearly every post-WWII conflict has been a miserable failure because, when the stakes are low, the US or its allies are not willing to commit horrific acts of violence like they did in Tokyo and Dresden. So we invade and and try to convince the people to like us which works about as well as you can expect.

Even now, we're not really trying to win in Ukraine because that would result in a nuclear war.

...

I guess Grenada was a good war...

That’s what happens when you gerrymander the definition of a victory to exclude everything we’ve achieved! Might as well say we didn’t really win WWII because we only got half of Germany, didn’t win the Civil War because today’s politics still align vaguely North vs. South, and must not have won the Revolutionary War, since it was really just inviting the War of 1812.

We’ve proven ourselves very good at dismantling state-level resistance. This discourages enemies from picking such fights. Between that dynamic, economic dependence, and the Big Red Button, we managed spend the rest of the 20th century achieving policy goals without state-on-state warfare. Europe couldn’t go twenty-five years without a continent-spanning war. Now it’s been three times that. When deterrence works, it’s almost as if nothing happened at all. When it doesn’t, you see the long tail of problems too thorny to solve with our considerable toolbox. And even then, what’s the damage? Four to five thousand deaths in the entire Iraq war, half that of the Battle of the Bulge alone.

I think you’re also mistaken to treat the civilian firebombings as decisive. Germany maintained a will to fight long after we made it quite miserable for them. What they couldn’t maintain were trucks and aircraft and all the other necessities of modern war. There’s a better case for Japan, but I’d argue the nuclear advantage deserves special consideration.

Conversely, we’ve still shown a distressing willingness to 1) commit war crimes and 2) level entire regions. Neither of those won Vietnam, because resistance in Vietnam was not organized along the same principles as Germany or Japan. That’s the same reason invading and occupying didn’t work like it did after WWII.

If you disagree, then what actions do you think the U.S. should have taken to win in Afghanistan? In Vietnam? I don’t believe finding larger population centers to bomb would have brought us any closer to our strategic goals.

In Afghanistan, the US should have not invaded Iraq. It's as a result of divided attention that OBL escaped to Pakistan. Once OBL was captured and executed, government should have been left in the hands of the various Talibans. AQ was the enemy, not the rest of the country.

If you disagree, then what actions do you think the U.S. should have taken to win in Afghanistan? In Vietnam?

This should be obvious.

None.

Afghanistan and Vietnam were immoral conflicts because the price of victory was too high. We should have simply done nothing. (Or, at most, limited intelligence actions similar to what Israel does).

Sanctions would have been enough to deal with the Ukrainian situation. Instead we're going to have 1 million dead Ukrainians and 5-10 million displaced and we're still going to lose most likely. Even a victory condition now ends with Ukraine permanently de-peopled. With friends like these...

Yes, you made it very clear last time we talked about this.

I’m asking why you think another Dresden or Tokyo would improve the situation.

It wouldn’t. Sometimes you just have to take the L.

For all it's overwhelming firepower, the U.S. seems to have very few clean victories in the post-WWII error.

Is this to imply that WW2 was a clean victory?

WW2- which saw the rise of a US-enabled strategic competitor who would dominate not only half of Europe but win China, a shattering of the global order which led to decades of peasant rebellions and revolutionary ideology, a demonstration and rush for weapons of mass destruction, major militarization and social upheaval that resulted from the macroeconomic disruptions?

Is 'clean' a reasonable frame here, or is it an unreasonable standard that's dismissing victories that are very rarely clean even when done by the most competent of people?

Good point. Wars are almost always negative for all parties.

And bad ceasefires can lead to worse. C'est la vie.

I’m struggling to think of examples of bad cease fires.

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