\nalthough I have seen some solemn pronouncements that defeating Iran won\u2019t be as easy as Vietnam or Iraq and it\u2019s like um you do know you guys lost in Vietnam and you\u2019re losing Iraq, why not just skip the missiles and drop the sanctions and open a bunch of McDonalds and wait twenty years, that usually works wonders.
oh we defeated the Napoleonic forces of the NVA and the forces of the Iraqi Republic (once at the head of a huge multi-all-the-national-that-counted coalition against them alone, once against a degraded version) easily
lost to partisan irregulars tho
the US was never a ground empire tho, our plan for the Fulda Gap was a fighting retreat with tactical nuke escalation, we had to manipulate Yugoslavia into exhausting itself against itself, even at our 90s peak we never fought an Iran-level enemy without everyone on our side
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