Conflicts, whether short or prolonged, usually end in one of two ways. Either one side achieves a decisive victory over the other, typically followed by the signing of a surrender agreement and the imposition of the victor’s terms on the defeated party, as happened in the first and second world wars, both of which ended in Allied victory. Or such wars end in a settlement based on the principle of “no victor and no vanquished”, with each side throwing the full extent of its military capabilities into battle against the other.
Both sides are exhausted without either achieving a decisive result, at which point they move to end the fighting and reach a settlement that takes their interests into account. The war then ends almost as though it had never begun, apart from the human and material losses it caused. One example is the Iran-Iraq war, which lasted eight years without either Iran or Iraq achieving its objectives.
Iraq did not liberate Arabistan, and Iran did not succeed in overthrowing Iraq’s Baath Party regime. Looking at America’s modern wars, the truth is that it has not won any of them. It may not have been defeated, but it did not achieve the objectives for which those wars were fought.
The image of the helicopter evacuations from Saigon remains vivid, as does the historic scene at Kabul airport, when America’s allies clung desperately to a lifeline, to no avail. In the Vietnam War, the Americans lost nearly 60,000 military personnel. The result was an agreement in Paris to end the war and provide the United States with a way out, amid a clear Vietnamese victory.
The Americans withdrew from Vietnam and the country was unified on Vietnamese terms. The same was true of the US war in Afghanistan. Thousands of tonnes of bombs were dropped on the country, only for the United States to withdraw suddenly and chaotically, in scenes that resembled an escape from disaster.
Then there was the US invasion of Iraq, where the war seemed almost to have been fought on Iran’s behalf. What Tehran had been unable to achieve during the eight-year war, America achieved for it by handing Iraq over to Iran. America may lose wars, but it does not learn from them before starting another.
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