Which wars of the last 100 years were more effective than not?
- Thread starter Seattle
- Start date
Xelasnave.1947
Valued Senior Member
The war on drugs is rather productive.
It maintains a high market price for product such that many can earn a living.
In addition funding for drug control supports many folk either at the front line or in supplying goods in support.
Many are occupied and the death rate is relatively low .. So it is a great war.
Alex
It maintains a high market price for product such that many can earn a living.
In addition funding for drug control supports many folk either at the front line or in supplying goods in support.
Many are occupied and the death rate is relatively low .. So it is a great war.
Alex
There has been bad peace in Korea, Cambodia, China, Eastern Europe, South Africa, Indonesia, Siberia, Russia, and others. Granted, it was set up by war - but there aren't many places free of the effects of war.
Meanwhile: If the US had used its influence in the Americas and Africa to take all the refugees from Europe and Asia, and confined its aid to material and diplomacy and its military push to defense of North America and the Southern Hemisphere, we might be better off now - all of us: the world. It's reasonably, cynically, possible (beating up on Japan and Germany, getting instead Mao and Stalin, is at least questionable, no?) And since it is possible, reasonably, the enormous moral cost (on top of the direct political and cultural, as well as economic, cost in the US) of WWII seems difficult to justify.
So even the US role in WWII is difficult to defend, as a wise thing to do.
Meanwhile: If the US had used its influence in the Americas and Africa to take all the refugees from Europe and Asia, and confined its aid to material and diplomacy and its military push to defense of North America and the Southern Hemisphere, we might be better off now - all of us: the world. It's reasonably, cynically, possible (beating up on Japan and Germany, getting instead Mao and Stalin, is at least questionable, no?) And since it is possible, reasonably, the enormous moral cost (on top of the direct political and cultural, as well as economic, cost in the US) of WWII seems difficult to justify.
So even the US role in WWII is difficult to defend, as a wise thing to do.
Fraggle Rocker
Staff member
I find it easier to identify the wars that were LEAST effective. These would be the wars in which the USA was fighting enemy forces that were trained and supplied by China: the Korean War and the Vietnam War.
I can accept the prevailing point of view that we had to stop China from simply annexing Korea. But since Korea is attached to China, we were basically fighting China in its own backyard. We managed to keep them from annexing South Korea, but what cost? And what did we gain for all those dead American soldiers?
Twenty years later... we got Hyundais! Whoopee!
I will (grudgingly) forgive the U.S. government for sending troops to Korea. But I will NEVER forgive them for sending troops to VIETNAM! This was a replay of Korea: making war against a country that is adjacent to China.
The Chinese had learned a lot about us during Korea, so they beat the pants off of us in Vietnam. There was no armistice; our troops had a few hours to board a fleet of helicopters and get the hell out of the country before the Chinese troops arrived.
This would have been bad enough if our purpose for attacking Vietnam was to "save" the population from communism. But that wasn't it at all. Various corporations had been quietly lobbying our government to start that war, because war is good for business.
The aerospace industry obviously made a fortune by building military aircraft--and every time one of them was shot down, they got an order to build NEW ONE! The big shots were making a fortune off of OUR DEAD PILOTS!
The chemical industry also made a fortune, although it wasn't so obvious. Our brilliant strategists felt that the Vietnamese countryside had too many trees, which made it easy for people to hide with anti-aircraft weapons. So Dow, Monsanto and a couple of other despicable chemical companies developed heavy-duty herbicides that could turn a lovely forest into a barren acre of dead trees within a couple of days. These chemicals were so strong that the forests could not revive for TWO OR THREE YEARS! They had actually POISONED THE SOIL! The Vietnamese were a rural people who ate fruits and vegetables they gathered from the forests, augmented by what they could grow in their own farms. With their soil poisoned, they were STARVING!
The third industry to make a fortune from the Vietnam war was a brand new one: the software industry. Third-generation mainframe computers had just been invented, giving any organization a tremendous push forward in the way it managed information--such as blueprints, plans and charts. I worked in information technology (or I.T., as it was quickly shortened), but in a municipal government, so I personally didn't get rich from the war. But I had several friends who had been recruited by start-up firms and were happily working overtime--writing programs that were to be used to manage the war, although many of them were never told exactly what they were doing. This was, after all, the era of the Counterculture, and the majority of people in their 20s would have barfed if told they were supporting a war.
Aerospace, chemical and software: three growing, powerful industries were making a fortune off the war, and the beauty of it (from their amoral perspective) was that it didn't matter at all whether the U.S. would win or lose!
I can accept the prevailing point of view that we had to stop China from simply annexing Korea. But since Korea is attached to China, we were basically fighting China in its own backyard. We managed to keep them from annexing South Korea, but what cost? And what did we gain for all those dead American soldiers?
Twenty years later... we got Hyundais! Whoopee!
I will (grudgingly) forgive the U.S. government for sending troops to Korea. But I will NEVER forgive them for sending troops to VIETNAM! This was a replay of Korea: making war against a country that is adjacent to China.
The Chinese had learned a lot about us during Korea, so they beat the pants off of us in Vietnam. There was no armistice; our troops had a few hours to board a fleet of helicopters and get the hell out of the country before the Chinese troops arrived.
This would have been bad enough if our purpose for attacking Vietnam was to "save" the population from communism. But that wasn't it at all. Various corporations had been quietly lobbying our government to start that war, because war is good for business.
The aerospace industry obviously made a fortune by building military aircraft--and every time one of them was shot down, they got an order to build NEW ONE! The big shots were making a fortune off of OUR DEAD PILOTS!
The chemical industry also made a fortune, although it wasn't so obvious. Our brilliant strategists felt that the Vietnamese countryside had too many trees, which made it easy for people to hide with anti-aircraft weapons. So Dow, Monsanto and a couple of other despicable chemical companies developed heavy-duty herbicides that could turn a lovely forest into a barren acre of dead trees within a couple of days. These chemicals were so strong that the forests could not revive for TWO OR THREE YEARS! They had actually POISONED THE SOIL! The Vietnamese were a rural people who ate fruits and vegetables they gathered from the forests, augmented by what they could grow in their own farms. With their soil poisoned, they were STARVING!
The third industry to make a fortune from the Vietnam war was a brand new one: the software industry. Third-generation mainframe computers had just been invented, giving any organization a tremendous push forward in the way it managed information--such as blueprints, plans and charts. I worked in information technology (or I.T., as it was quickly shortened), but in a municipal government, so I personally didn't get rich from the war. But I had several friends who had been recruited by start-up firms and were happily working overtime--writing programs that were to be used to manage the war, although many of them were never told exactly what they were doing. This was, after all, the era of the Counterculture, and the majority of people in their 20s would have barfed if told they were supporting a war.
Aerospace, chemical and software: three growing, powerful industries were making a fortune off the war, and the beauty of it (from their amoral perspective) was that it didn't matter at all whether the U.S. would win or lose!
The North Vietnamese and Viet Cong did not consider themselves Chinese. The soldiers coming into Saigon were none of them Chinese. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fall_of_Saigon
And the American fraction of the War - the second major phase of the Colonial rebellion, from the Vietnamese point of view - was not even favored by the Chinese (or the Soviets): https://www.wilsoncenter.org/articl...ntially-to-vietnam-war-victory-claims-scholar It only gained Chinese and (significantly) Soviet support after the US and its client State canceled the elections that had been agreed and scheduled in the south.
The Vietnamese were not Chinese proxies, either. They were quite serious about that: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sino-Vietnamese_War
Ophiolite
Valued Senior Member
Precisely so. I was about to make a similar post when I saw you had beaten me to it. It's almost as if FR was off-planet during the war.