You are arguing semantics yourself and operating under the rhetoric of a very well known specific US made American history.
You cannot just include what you want from a definition and leave the rest to categorise something, because you want to see it that way.
Even though I was using
your definition of "total war"? Do you get what I'm saying? Even by your own definition of "total war," America's post-WWII wars don't fit.
That definition does NOT belong to me. It's not my personal desire to determine its design. Total war is a war which is unrestricted in terms, weaponry meaning which the attack is carried among civilians; to the whole population in an area hospitals, schools...you name it, in an indiscriminated way.
What about weaponry, which is also a part of your "total war" definition — like the lack of the afforementioned nukes? What about when those wars never expand beyond the specific country the US was fighting? Remember that US wars during the Cold War were proxy wars; those countries had allies that would be fair targets for a total war doctrine — that's a restriction in terms.
As to civilians, troops could hardly be expected to just stand and
take it when civilians themselves shoot and throw grenades at them.
There isn't a need of mobilising the whole country and its resources to pursue a total war described above if the aggressor CAN AFFORD TO maintain that war without doing it.
Well, yes. The
same war can be a limited war to one party, yet be total war for the other. "Total war" is a term referring to how a particular country is proscecuting their war effort, which can certainly differ from country to country. It has
fuck-all to do with the scale of destruction the war causes, or how horrible it turns out to be. It's
irrelevant to the term.
As the US policy has done,as US and is allies can afford to. This is not a conspiracy theory, it is the reality we live in a 10 year old kid can get. You just don't go around and say; "oh we didn't need to fit the set of conditions of a total war in book terms, so we didn't fight any total wars." Obviously you can say it. It's a fucking politician line. Propaganda. Fucking lie. Reality doesn't change with stomping your foot down and hiding behind a military text definition.
You seem to be saying that if I don't agree that all war is "total war," then that somehow diminishes the suffering of the victims of our recent wars. It does not.
No, we are examining how do you perceive your country's recent history, what you can or cannot acknowledge about it in an internet forum conversation.
Go fuck yourself. I acknowledge the fact that our post-WWII wars were horrible things that killed many civilians and caused untold suffering and destruction. However, the
topic of this thread is why the US can't seem to win it's recent wars. I only brought up total war as a characterization of how the US was proscecuting its wars,
not as a diminishing of the suffering of the US's war victims. This is because, callous as this sounds, this discussion is NOT about the suffering of war victims.
So unless you can explain how the US targeting hospitals and schools (when?) damaged its ability to bring those wars to successful conclusions, you are just listening to yourself talk.
