WAR: The Glorious Endings of Our Wars
Vietnam’s Paris Peace Accords were violated before the ink dried. Iraq was declared “sovereign, stable, and self-reliant” — then lost forty percent of its territory to ISIS within thirty months. Afghanistan’s three-hundred-thousand-strong army dissolved in eleven days. In this fourth article in the Eight Critical Skills war series, we examine the final scenes of America’s three longest wars — the helicopter evacuations, the collapsing armies, the enemies walking into presidential palaces through the front door — and ask what, precisely, eight trillion dollars and nine hundred thousand lives purchased. The answer, in every case, was the precise opposite of the promise. Non-partisan. Data-driven. Devastating.
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