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Sometimes I wonder why we play, full time, the "conscience of the world" while Iran, North Korea and the Arab countries show no scruples at all. They don't care that we're nice or play fair.
Sometimes I wonder why we play, full time, the "conscience of the world" while Iran, North Korea and the Arab countries show no scruples at all. They don't care that we're nice or play fair.
You mistake being "nicer" and "fairer" to being "nice" and "fair".
Sometimes I wonder why we play, full time, the "conscience of the world" while Iran, North Korea and the Arab countries show no scruples at all. They don't care that we're nice or play fair.
And what country do you believe is looked on more favorably by the nations of the World? North Korea? The Arab countries? Or, the United States of America? At least I was confident of that answer before the current administration took office.
And what country do you believe is looked on more favorably by the nations of the World? North Korea? The Arab countries? Or, the United States of America? At least I was confident of that answer before the current administration took office.
They run the UN even though they don't pay for it. Someone must like them.
The premise of this thread it that when a party starts a war and loses, the defending side should be allowed to finish it. In the cases of WW I, Korea and Vietnam the aggressors, respectively Germany/Austro-Hungarian Empire, North Korea and North Vietnam started wars. The wars ended in armistices, not in military victories. In all cases complete victory was possible but the West, being “nice” left the losing side to their own devices. In all cases it has leapt us to bite us.
The above is predicated on a completely confused understanding of conflict. War is not a game such as Battleship. "War is", as Clausewitz observed, "the continuation of politics by other means."
One doesn't go to war to 'win'. One goes to war to achieve objectives. Sometimes those objectives can be achieved without 'total victory' (which is never total, notwithstanding the claims of this thread, but we can let that go). A classic example would be the Falklands War. What sort of lunatic thinks the UK should have conquered Argentina? The British achieved their objective. Since London was unhinged, the war ended there. In the case of the Korean War, the objective was also accomplished. The idea that mission creep should invariably morph objectives into pointless 'total victory' is inane. It demands that all sight of a national goal be cast aside in favor of your feel-good "Boy, we sure kicked some ass!" puffery. But that you need wars to be tidy (or at least, to end in a way that you can pretend is such) is all about you and speaks nothing, nothing at all, about national need. Basically, there is no reason war should be prosecuted with your self-esteem in mind. Or Vietnam. We needed to stop communism in its tracks or it would roll up all of Southeast Asia. Well, we didn't. And it didn't. The premise of that war was faulty. Communism was contained and collapsed, continuing to exist is a few corners of the world where the only places that 'communist' states are viable (China, Vietnam) they are functionally communist in name only. But none of that matters, because you see a wide array of problems (that don't exist) over not only the U.S. failure to preserve the South Vietnamese dictatorship but - absurdly - to conquer the North.
Further, it is simplistically child-like to think of conflict in black-and-white terms. Rather, like all conflicts, there is a long continuum of costs and benefits. At the granular level, the expense of conquest is often not worth the cost. So what's the point? Oh, right - to make you feel good.
As a side-note, how much ignorance - both of specific history and the nature of conflict in general - is required to see that the ends of conflicts without the mythical 'total victory' is an attempt at being "nice"? A considerable amount.
Simply put, you manage to get almost everything wrote in your post utterly wrong.
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