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Originally Posted by Dragonlich
Fred181, the classical sense of winning would be to annihilate an enemy. Nukes can do that.
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In Vietnam the United States killed between 1 and 2 million Vietnamese versus roughly 58,000 American lives lost and 350,000 casualties. That is some pretty heavy casualties inflicted yet I don't think there are too many people out there that would argue that we won. And based on your arguement that victory involves total annihilation of the enemy we have yet to win the Revolutionary War, WWI or WWII. On the contrary, modern war is waged for political reasons and it's victories are measured through political gains.
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Originally Posted by Dragonlich
Political goals you'd achieve: destruction of your opponent.
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Political goals you'd achieve: completely alienating the rest of the world (even more so than we already have). Imagine attacking a country because they posesed WMD and then dropping a WMD on them.
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(Of course, there will be many more other problems that will spring up afterwards, but that's a different matter.)
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Not really what I would consider just "a different matter"... But I guess given your argument, you're right we could drop a few nuclear weapons on Baghdad, Fallujah, Kabul and while we're at it the entire Middle East and Southwest Asia. Who cares about all of the innocent people killed and the reaction by the rest of the world
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Originally Posted by pedro padilla
any major scale war in these times will involve nukes. thats what makes it major scale.
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So based on that there has never been a major scale war? I don't understand why nukes have to be present. We didn't use them in Iraq 1, Afghanistan, or Iraq 2. Are these not major scale wars?
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Originally Posted by pedro padilla
USA has a pretty good history of provoking unwanted conflicts with seemingly weak opponents.
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I don't doubt that, but please inform me which unwanted conflicts the US provoked and why they were unwanted.
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Originally Posted by pedro padilla
if it boils down to fighting in a foreign desert... we will never win.
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Like the first Gulf War?