CounterPunch Exclusives

CounterPunch Exclusives

Victory Disease in Iran

Old fortification in Oman. Photo by Matthew Stevenson.

Before the United States decides to stump up another half a trillion dollars for Pete Hegseth’s Excellent Adventures, it might want to answer the question why the country has only won a handful wars in the last hundred years?

Victory disease is defined as “dangerous overconfidence, arrogance, and complacency that arises within a leadership or military force following a string of decisive victories,” and most imperial powers in decline, including now the U.S., suffer from it chronically.

On paper, measured by budget appropriations, the U.S. army is the greatest show on turf—with endless gadgets, cruise missiles, and stealth bombers.

Since World War II, however, the United States has fought to the occasional draw—as happened in Korea—but in most of its splendid little wars it has been defeated.

The United States has lost wars in Cuba, Vietnam, Cambodia, Iraq, Iran (1979), and Afghanistan, and smaller engagements in places like Syria, Libya, and Lebanon.

The 1991 Gulf War did end with the Iraqis out of Kuwait and its malls, but that fighting ended at intermission, with the issues in Iraq and the Middle East still unresolved.

The three most glaring defeats—Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan—are examples of undeclared wars that involved the combined arms of the army, navy, and air forces, which at war’s end departed in rooftop helicopters with the American flag stuffed into a garbage bag or whatever.

In Vietnam, the United States tried everything in its “arsenal of democracy” (except maybe nuclear weapons or democracy itself), but got nowhere.

The Vietnam War cost the lives of some 58,000 soldiers, but really the death toll—when you add in the suicides of returning veterans—was in the hundreds of thousands (not counting the deaths of Vietnamese soldiers and civilians,

As Professor Christian Appy writes in........

© CounterPunch