Visitors are reflected in the Vietnam Veterans Memorial wall, etched with the names of more than 58,000 U.S. servicemen and women who died in the war, in Washington May 23, 2013. REUTERS/Yuri Gripas
Harlan Ullman, UPI: Why does the U.S. military have such a staggering record of failure?
The official end of the Cold War came in 1991 with the dissolution of the Soviet Union and the creation of the Russian Federation. Since then, remarkably, the United States has been at war or engaged in significant conflicts and military interventions in which tens of thousands of its soldiers, marines, sailors and airmen have been killed or wounded for over two-thirds of the intervening years. Iraq in 1991; Somalia in 1992-93; the global war on terror and Afghanistan 2001-present; Iraq 2003-present; and Syria and Yemen since 2016 represent a total of 19 of the past 26 years.
Using the end of World War II in 1945 at a starting point and including the Korean War (1950-53) and Vietnam Wars (from 1959 when the first Americans were killed to withdrawal in 1974), Americans have been in battle for 37 of the past 72 years or well over 50 percent. And the record has not been impressive. Korea was a draw. Vietnam was an ignominious defeat vividly portrayed by the poignant image of the last Huey helicopter lifting off the roof of an apartment building in Saigon.
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WNU Editor: Some wins. Some loses. Overall .... nothing to brag or be proud about.
6 comments:
Waiting for BPOSTER's "Russia wins all wars" feverish comments *gets popcorn* :)
Anon,
I never said Russia wins all wars. Maybe you didn't fully read my posts.
Saying these campaigns were losses is not right. The United States imposes huge costs on its opponents. Fighting the U.S. ruins their economies and deprives their citizens of opportunity. That in itself is a deterrent.
For example, according to the Japan External Trade Organization, the average annual salary of a Vietnamese worker last year was $1,740, but MALAYSIA was US$ 14,619.
According to http://www.averagesalarysurvey.com annual wages for Iran were US$ 10,029 vs Saudi Arabia at US$ 64,484.
Compare Japan US$ 34,549; South Korea US$ 25,806; China US$ 15,411.
According to US National Public Radio per capita income in North Korea is estimated to be as little as $1,000 a year.
So, yes, these countries can continue to fight the U.S., but they don't win they just continue to fall farther and farther behind everyone else.
And when a North Korean vs South Korean has one twenty-fifth the ability to buy a pound of wheat, things get bad for the North Korean quickly whenever there is a shortage. We have seen that happen in the 90's.
I am not saying the U.S. strategy is great. What I am saying is that the strategy that is being called "losing" in this article is not that.
I would go even farther than that. The policy is simply to call any nation the 'enemy' when designs furthering colonial exploitation are to be expedited. Control of world currency has enabled the absolutely ludicrous ability to penalize victims by denying ownership of what are essentially " I.O.U." 's on spurious grounds - or none at all ; i.e. welshing on debt ! Iran was denied its U.S. dollar deposits despite their being a natural outcome of resource sales and international trading based on the policy of claiming they were evil for what they might choose to do - even as they clearly claimed the exact opposite and could show their actions were consistent with their description. Ridiculous foreign exchange policies have similar effects where a nation's currency is devalued so it exists in poverty. It gets to the point that blockade/sanctions deprives a nation of its income and access to trade ( so much for Free Trade ). Such actions were clearly implicated in Japan's decision to try for a decisive sucker punch against the USA in 1941 after the USA interfered with access to oil.
We beat the hell out of Grenada,LOL!!!
I think the main issue was the attempt to defeat vicious insurgencies on home soil, against fanatics who have little regard for death and even less for the people they are supposedly trying to "liberate" from "the Great Satan" or "imperialism". On top of that, during the upheavals after WWII the American public opinion turned strongly against the wars, which obviously made defeat inevitable in any case. The Americans were also seemingly unwilling to resort to the kind of subhuman brutality that is effective against such enemies, the kind that was employed by the Italians in Libya or the Russians in Chechnya or even in Aleppo albeit on a much smaller scale.
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