If you flattened the whole country like you keep insisting it seems like they’d already have been killed.
that’s a pretty dumb statement, even from a pacifist. Not the whole country - just the military/industrial centers. . Now, moving away from Viet Nam history, to the Red Sea; yeah. a massive campaign against the military/industrial side of the Houties is necessary. They have attacked American shipping - it’s time to deliver a “reckoning” to them: DON’T FU@K WITH US". It must be disproportional for them to get the message.
I agree with your statement with caution. We know the Houthis, like Hamas don’t believe in diplomacy. Hamas attacked Israel hoping to push force a response that would result in worldwide condemnation.
The Houthis are playing the same game but incrementally with the goal of pushing the US into the role of aggressor. While I also agree that carpet bombing the Houthis into a cloud of dust has a certain appeal, there is no reason for the US to take the bait and escalate beyond the current standoff. The disruption of maritime traffic by itself is not an existential threat to the US or Israel or any other country and not a good enough reason to spark a nuclear holocaust.
Besides that, there’s no plus side to the US war industry in derailing the current gravy train.
Partly agree, but when they launch missiles/drones at US flagged & crewed vessels, it’s time to drop 58.5 tons of diplomacy on a target. Not really into carpet bombing, just flattening Command & Control, all their aircraft & radar sites, ammo depots & training facilities. Just a single week-long campaign to get their attention. Don’t have to go after cities. You’re right, it’s not an existential threat - so let’s not wait for it to become one.
US dropped a greater tonnage of ordinance on Vietnam than the allies dropped on Germany in WWII.
My God, we’re not even out of all the Middle Eastern countries we invaded 20 years ago and now there are people who want us to start the whole cycle again…
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We got better at it. Somehow not at winning hearts and minds though.
What seems to be forgotten in the discussion, is that US personnel and assets are being attacked, while peacefully going about their business. It isn’t the US defending freedom of the seas for other countries, and It cannot be conflated with the Gaza/Israel conflict, irrespective of what the attackers [Houties] say. To not respond with a disproportional action, will just encourage more attacks, unless one takes the perspective that the US should appease and retreat.
Bribe rhe hell out of their second and lower tier command.
Bribe them to fail, fold, spindle and mutilate, to forget and f up all the way down to the latrine truck driver.
Make their lower echelons unreliable and rich. Make the Iranians curse them
It’s cheaper to rain low denomination green backs than bombs.
In that part of the world money can but you some pretty agreeable enemies.
If we are going to do anything, we need to go after the source of the problem: IRAN.
Go after all the nuclear sites and the civil infrastructure that supports them.
Go after the drone and missile industry and the civil infrastructure that supports it.
Go after the oil fields, pipelines and terminals that finance it all.
Go after the repressive religious leadership. Set the Iranian people free.
If that were done, the Houthi’s and a lot of other problems would just wither away.
Increase support to Ukraine ten fold so that they can bleed Russia dry, and limit Russian support of global terror.
Or… instead of putting the money printers back into overdrive and making my pay worth less and less we can open energy exploration and production back up in our country and make their oil worth less.
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There is a falsehood going about that the USA has not won any wars since WW2. People have short memories. The US/Allies won the Gulf War. We did it because the USA worked a diplomatic game to form a military coalition to solve a specific problem in the Middle East. The shooting part of the war was over in a a few days.
The coalition was the key part, the hard part. We didn’t need the rest of the world’s firepower. We wanted the world to act together as a lesson to dictators there would be no place to run to if they wanted to disrupt world commerce.
If one wants to wipe out the Houthis then work on the coalition first and the bombing second.
(The other war we won, by the way, was the costliest war in human history, and one of the longest and most momentous in human history. The Cold War. NATO versus the Soviet empire. 1947 to 1991. Korean War and Vietnam war could be considered major campaigns in this war. One a draw, the other a loss for the US.
There were other campaigns in this sense, in Africa and Malaysia. Despite the losses , NATO won. An example of perseverance in the face of setback. What we did not know at the time was that it was a war of attrition not of manpower but of money. We outspent the Soviets. It ended a familiar way. One side collapsed. The Soviet empire collapsed and was dismantled.
A real war where millions lost their lives and trillions were spent, and a great empire was destroyed. We seldom celebrate that win. Odd.)
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In 2024 dollars, we’ve spent Hundreds of Trillions of dollars on the military over the last 70 years, mostly to counter the Russians.
Spending a few Hundred Billion more to help Ukraine defeat Russia would be the best military investment we’ve ever made. Failing to help Ukraine defeat Russia now, will cost us many Trillions more than ever to counter the Russians in the future.
Most of the bad things in the World usually involve: the “Axis of Evil”: Russia, China, Iran and North Korea.
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My father was in the Korean War. He was convinced that we lost. Vietnam was a loss.
I call the Gulf War a huge loss. We defeated Sadam Hussien and he was executed. Then we made the huge mistake of excluding the Ba’ath Party and the Army from participating in the new government, instead of co-opting them. This created a ferocious insurgency that took years and trillions of dollars, along with thousands of US lives, to defeat. We withdrew, declared victory, and ISIS took over. Then we had to go back to defeat ISIS. Now Iraq is basically controlled by Iran backed militias.
We spent something like $10 Trillion on Iraq and Afghanistan. We lost and have nothing to show for it, but thousands of dead soldiers, a lot of wounded vets, and a huge national debt. I call that a hell of a loss.
We won the Cold War economically, not militarily.
This proves that best defense is a strong economy with tremendous spending capacity and the ability to print money in the World’s reserve currency. With $32 Trillion in debt, how much longer are we going to have that capacity?
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If you count the Gulf War as a loss then you have to count WW1 as a loss, because we had to fight Germany again a few years later.
If the Korean War was a loss then you have to explain South Korea.
From another post of mine, about China, from Newsweek:
…”China’s GDP fell to $17.5 trillion and slipped a percentage point to 17 percent of the global total, Magnus said…
…The United States’ global share was about 25 percent in 2022 and rose by 6 percent to approximately $27 trillion last year…
…Data from top financial institutions like the World Bank show the gap between the two largest economies widened further last year. China’s economy was just two-thirds the size of its geopolitical rival, down from 70 percent in 2022 and 76 percent in 2021.”
Seems like a pretty robust economy to me.
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Therein lies one of the major reasons we have this mess today. Despite American policy and law, we allowed (and probably even financed directly or indirectly) Israel’s nuke, all the while claiming not to know. This hypocrisy was seen by the rest of the world, particularly the Arabic world, as just one more example of American support of imperialism in that region. We hatched the egg that Britain laid in 1917. Thanks to the defense industry and its servants in the great domed auction house in DC we are in this position now.
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A divided Korea, and the need to defend South Korea with US troops for the last 70 years at great expense with no end in sight? I have to call that a loss.
There was 20 years of peace between WWI and WWII.
I think we can say that we won WWI.
There was also a big difference between the assination of Arch Duke Ferdinand in the Hapsburg Empire, and the rise of Adolph Hitler in Germany.
WWII is proof that everyone, especially Europeans, needs to stand up early and often to the wannabe Hitlers, Stalins, and Putins. Instead, Europe and NATO still has a bunch of latter day Neville Chamberlins sucking up to Putin. Orban and Erdogan among them.
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Anybody in particular in mind?
There are also World Bank data comparing the US-China economies in PPP terms: