Originally Posted by
mundame
No, we clearly no longer fight to win: that is obvious! Well, except I guess for when we DO win --- Grenada, Panama, Desert Storm and of course Serbia.
But there are too many very important national calamities where we fought but did NOT win: Iraq, Vietnam, Afghanistan even, Cuba, Korea.
Friedman is saying that even though we didn't bother to win (and I think that's really what is going on), it didn't matter and maybe we won anyway, because we DID move from strength to strength as a world power.
And that is a very provocative thought. So.........maybe showing that we are a pugnacious nation, one who WILL fight so watch out enemies ---- is a good thing, because even if we didn't "win," who wants us to come lose like THAT? Whole cities in rubble, tens and hundreds of thousands of people killed, millions in the case of Vietnamese and so on. This is LOSING? Yes, but it's not the sort of defeat nations invite in.
And by not winning "whatever it takes," as all conservatives invariably call for, aren't we preserving something of our non-Hun, non-Bosche reputation, what little there is of it left after too many atrocities in Iraq and Afghanistan? Real viciousness in war was the Germans' best tactic, no question: when they deviated from that, they did poorly. The poison gas, the unrestricted submarine sinkings, the flamethrowers ----
But you know, nobody ever liked the Germans. The world united to defeat them, and they are not (so far) doing that to us. Because we aren't just obliterating Iraq and turning it to glass: the Germans probably would have, with our weapons.
Maybe not. Maybe the Germans would simply have stopped the looting and made sure the weapons dumps weren't open arsenals, which we didn't have the sense to do.
I think these losing wars were all terrible mistakes, yes --- but by not viciously murdering all the foreign people we had invaded in order to "win," whatever that means, we have preserved some reputation, enough to survive against hostile world opinion.
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