Quote (thundercock @ Jun 1 2020 10:02pm)
Indeed, America could easily do that, but at what cost? You might end up escalating things where we have road side bombs on your way to Safeway and then we're no better than the Middle East. It's Ilhan Omar's wet dream to make America like that and I don't want that to happen.
All good points. The military could still stop this in a heartbeat.
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I think the best thing to do is to keep it in the cities, preferably the ghettos, and let them starve. Basically, take a page from Israel and see how they confined all the terrorism to the Gaza Strip.
Again, a possible solution. But it really just puts off dealing with something to a later day.
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As for Vietnam, I'd say it's a military victory for sure. We obliterated that country but you always have to balance war with diplomacy/politics. America doesn't really know how to fix things once it blows everything up. Damn Democrats...
This, I will have to disagree with. Somewhere along the line America or world pressure, decided that it's possible to fight "nice" wars. It isn't. It just defers the showdown to someone else's watch.
After Japan, in WWII, the world was pretty scared of the US. We could end any war in two seconds, and we could end the world in not much longer.
Hence... Korea and Nam. We had to prove to the world we could fight "nice" wars. But in reality, that's not how wars work. Wars are full spectrum dominance, or stay home.
Back in the early 1900's Andrew Carnegie had a group of enforcers called the Pug Uglies. They wore rings with little knife blades on the top. Carnegie's rule for the Pug Uglies was... only take ONE eye. If you take both, the man has nothing to lose, and he won't stop coming after you, till the day he dies. The ONLY other option he said... was to just kill them outright. But, he added.... dead men don't pay.
Carnegie won in his time, and he won in history. Today, he's a Pittsburgh hero.
"Nice" wars don't work. N Korea and Nam are... still after us. The Korean war ended in 53 and Nam ended in 75, and we still have no treaties, and history will record those wars as going badly for the US.
/e For anyone not familiar with Andrew Carnegie... he pretty much built Pittsburgh. He WAS Pittsburgh steel.
/ee There's a very easy to understand, summary of what I'm talking about in the original Star Trek episode: "A Taste of Armageddon". Give it a watch sometime.
This post was edited by Ghot on Jun 1 2020 08:38pm