I’ve heard many Rah-Rah America types claim that ‘we’ve never lost a war’. I was just thinking that the same thing was true in ancient Mesopotamia. Of all the tablets and inscriptions we have, we almost never find that any of them will admit to a military defeat. Constantly we are told that king so-and-so ‘utterly destroyed the rebellion’ and ‘tore down its walls’, yet goes back to suppress a revolt from the same city five months later. The Egyptian and Babylonian kings are always winning decisive victories, their soldiers are superior to their cowardly enemies, etc.; I mean if you believed them all you’d have to conclude that everyone wins every war.
The more things change…
That’s a good point.
Even if the Federal Government wins every war, then things will collapse at home from waging so many wars.
<2% of the Americans are now anti-war due to the fact that the Obama has now completely brought liberals/the Democratic Party back to its Wilsonian roots.
When I was a cadet learning the correct means to enslave myself to the whims of politicians and become a murderous uncivilized bullet catcher, we were being taught the proper salute ritual which involved turning your hand so the palm faced the face because unlike the British, the USA had never lost a war. The other cadets and I got a chuckle out of that one and then wispers of wars, military operations, etc began going through the crowd as we attempted to determine which ones the USA had really won and which ones the USA lost.
Certainly Vietnam was not a loss but a tactacial withdraw in the face of a more determined enemy. Korea was not a loss but just a place where everybody hated the weather so bad that everyone left without really winning. I brought up the wars at the time in Columbia, Afghanistan, Iraq, Lebanon and there were people who argued that the USA had won all of them. Boy were they wrong about Afghanistan.
If you are in a war ,you lost …
The USA government didn’t win the Vietnam war. I’d consider that a loss.
I’ve heard this phrase about something being ‘written by the victors’, but I can’t remember what it was.
In any case I’d say that almost all of the wars that Americans have been involved in were not worth it. They may have won every battle, but in the grand scheme of things they have lost every war.
The other responses are kind of hinting that the concept of winning even the most minor violent orgy of death and destruction is really not winning at all. Mises pointed this out during WW1 when he said that instead of getting thousands killed and millions of dollars of property destroyed and countless millions lost in malinvestments from inflation, the Austrians could have purchased the property they were fighting over from Italy for a whole lot less money.
The ultimate example of this is WW1 where some historians tried to estimatet the value of stuff destroyed and came out with a number very close to the computation of the value of all production in the industrial revolution. Ofr the USA the greatest win against its own citizens (To server and protect) was a financial disaster and left the South as an ecnomic basket case. The gain was the keeping of the South in the Union instead of just being right beside it at the cost in lives of 600000 plus 1.2million casualties.