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Comment by immibis

3 days ago

The last war the USA won was World War 2.

Yes, it can do enough damage to make other countries adopt DMCA anti-circumvention law out of fear, but it always manages to snatch ultimate defeat.

The USA-led coalition conclusively won the Gulf War. We don’t think about it as much precisely because it wasn’t a boondoggle that lasted years and years.

  • Since the Vietnam war the US has successfully (defined by "achieved the stated goals") invaded a country as part of the following conflicts:

      Grenada (1983)
      Panama to arrest General Noriega (1989)
      Iraq in Gulf War 1 (1991)
      Haiti (1994) 
      
    

    There have been other conflicts the US was involved with that they won too, but the others didn't involve invasions (eg NATO in Bosnia

  • > The USA-led coalition conclusively won the Gulf War.

    That was a weird win with another invasion required for some reason and a toxic legacy of Gulf War Syndrome and no fly zones.

    Military the US crushed it but it didn’t seem to solve anything.

    • The goal of the First Gulf War was, expressly, to liberate Kuwait from Iraqi control and (to a much smaller degree) to remove Iraq as a possible regional hegemon for the next decade or so. Which it succeeded at. Once you've succeeded at your objectives, and the enemy has capitulated, what value is there to prosecuting the war further?

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I'm going to go out on a limb and say that most countries haven't adopted US copyright standards out of a concern that the US military is going to break down their door; they're motivated by the opportunity to sell goods to the massive US consumer market.