Can You Lose A War And Win A War?
From Sideways Mencken:
Straws in the wind. Nothing conclusive. And bear in mind: they’ll manage to hit us again. Hard.
So I’m not saying it’s over. It’s a long way from over. But I think the tide has turned. I think Al Qaeda has jumped the shark. And I am starting to think that even while we lose one and a half small wars, we may win the big war.
Usually the United States wins its wars with overwhelming power. It’s what worked in the Civil War, the Spanish-American War, World War II and Gulf War I where we won convincing victories. It’s what we didn’t manage to bring to bear in 1812, Korea or Vietnam. We are good with a sledgehammer. Not so good with a scalpel. (Mexican-American war being perhaps our best scalpel-handling moment.) We stink when we do subtle. That’s why we’re in trouble in Iraq: we went with subtle.
But there’s another great American war, different from the other wars we fought because we never quite got around to the shooting at all. (Had we done so this blog would be written by a radioactive mutant cockroach named Zang.) That war, the Cold War, we didn’t win by bringing a crushing weight of men and materiel to bear. We won it by being Americans. We won it because we were right and the enemy was wrong about economics, and about the nature of man.
There’s MUCH more…so read it all.
3 Responses to “Can You Lose A War And Win A War?”
We can only hope that this long distance view will turn out to be the wiining one.
For the moment, it’s helpful to see things in this light, so that we don’t lose balance in day-to-day reactions to current news.
Well, yes, you can. For example, I’ve heard it argued that while sustaining a loss on the ground in Viet Nam, we achieved a strategic victory that was more important in a total Cold War context by mending fences with the Chinese.
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