• Pogogunner@sopuli.xyz
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    4 days ago

    Who won the wars between the US and Afghanistan, Iraq, and Vietnam? Was it the people with the bomber airplanes? Is the US winning the war against the Houthis?

    • FuglyDuck@lemmy.world
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      4 days ago

      If you want to call them “victories”, you can, I guess.

      Afghanistan, Iraq and Vietnam were all political wars without any clear military objective or purpose. They were basically unwinnable from the US side, and we “lost” because political pressure from the home front grew to the point where it was necessary to end the conflicts.

      Even if you disagree with that statement, 1.1 million Viet Cong and N. Vietnamese military personnel died, with another estimated 2 million civilian deaths on both sides of the Vietnamese war. Vietnam’s infrastructure was absolutely destroyed.

      In the second Iraq war, its estimated at 260k-460k deaths; also with their infrastructure being absolutely destroyed.

      the Afghanistan war has similar numbers and similar a similar toll on infrastructure.

      For a more accurate depiction of what a second US civil war would look like I suggest looking at The Troubles in Ireland. Only it’s going to be a lot more people killing their neighbors across a country with 360 million people. it will be a bloodbath, it will be awful, and it’s going to be ended by the military bombing the everliving fuck out of whatever is still moving at the end.

      stop glorifying violence. It’s not going to end the way you think it will.

      • phutatorius@lemmy.zip
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        21 hours ago

        Regarding the Troubles, it was a low-level civil war with the military involved with very limited rules of engagement. The UK military essentially served a police function, though it was institutionally biased in favor of the Unionists. There was no bombing, no artillery fire, none of that (though there were targeted assassinations, largely done by the UVF based on intel fed to them by the UK military). The UK establishment’s goal was to contain the problem, not to eliminate it. The Good Friday accord came after a generation-long stalemate. So that’s probably not a meaningful model of what might happen in the US.

        And people-power revolutions have occurred in many countries in the world, often without much violence (except for some perpetrated by the authoritarian states against their citizens, and even those tend to be limited). Many have succeeded. On the other hand, there have also been popular movements that have failed (for example, most of the Arab Spring revolutions). Even so, there is no reason to assume that resistance would inevitably lead to a Civil War 2.0 scenario. That would be a worst case; and considering that the pro-dictatorship faction is at most 40% of the population, and largely from the most economically irrelevant parts of the country, the most they could reasonably achieve would be unstable minority rule.