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Trump Says Top General Predicts Easy Victory Over Iran; He Says Otherwise in Private
(www.nytimes.com)
this post was submitted on 24 Feb 2026
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Was so heavily propagandized and subjected to so little scrutiny that it's likely impossible to know whether it was actually successful by any objective criteria.
Was famously two DECADES of achieving absolutely nothing and then retreating, ending in a decisive victory for the Taliban, who are in charge again.
The situation for anyone opposing them is identical to before the US invasion AT BEST, and the US (and allies) lost FSM knows how many soldiers, civilians, and billions of dollars on that abominable quagmire.
As far as colossal military failures go, it's arguably somewhere between the US interference in the Vietnam civil war and Hitler's invasion of the USSR.
From a military standpoint, the US military did not fail its tasks. It's the political side that's a failure
But in real life, it's impossible to decouple purely military objectives from political ones.
Afghanistan was nowhere near the scale of either of those two fiascos, and the Vietnam war was far smaller in scale than the USSR/Nazi war.
Vietnam war: US plus SVNA military deaths: 282k. VC: about 500k. Civilians: also about 500k.
USSR v Nazis: Easily 20 times those numbers.
That's the "the operation was a success, the patient died" of wars 🙄
Pyrrhic victory.
I never claimed otherwise
My point is that the military is inherently political, so it doesn't make sense to say that the military performed admirably and the politicians ruined it.
The military leadership ARE politicians.