Lots of things fail spectacularly to accomplish their stated purpose and yet persist, with ardent and happy supporters. Whenever you see this, ask yourself: cui bono?

Look to the ardent supporters. They are likely the ones seeing the benefit. Then ask yourself: what do they get out of it? Sometimes it’s an obvious material benefit such as money or power, but sometimes it’s a more nebulous emotional or psychological benefit, such as narcissistic supply.

The only way to kill an institution is to make it stop being of benefit to any stakeholders. Before you can do that, you need to know the whom and how of that benefit.

The strange thing is that Western Lefties still want Communism — despite the indisputable lessons of that history. But maybe that should not be a surprise, since those Western Lefties know nothing of their own history either.

NO! The Chinese spring offensive of 1951 was stopped. Then the allied forces began a counter-offensive and Chinese troops began to surrender en masse in platoon, company and battalion size. The commies asked for the truce negotiations as they knew their armies were falling apart. Truce talks too readily agreed to by the USA side.

Bruce Purcell: “Korea being a peninsula, we could build a line of defense and watch the sea. We’d have had to build fortifications around the whole interior border with Vietnam.”

Pournelle: “And in Viet Nam the North sent 150,000 men south with as much armor as the Wehrmacht had in many WW II engagements. That was in 1973, and of that 150,000 fewer than 50,000 men and no armor returned to the North, at a cost of under 1,000 American casualties…”

Well, if during 1975 the results were the same, could the North have continued? I suspect the South could have held them off indefinitely with copious supplies and air support.

But that’s exactly what a “loss” is.

If you’re a boxer and you take a dive, you’ve still lost, even if you cope by saying “the other guy didn’t really beat me.”

If you’re a boxer and your corner throws in the towel, you’ve lost, even if you’re not taking a beating. The other guy wins, even if he was taking worse than he was dishing out.

The political structure of the modern USA isn’t compatible with foreign war or lasting sacrifice. There’s nothing the Democrats hate more than people like you and me. Communists and Arabs are their best buddies.

You could say “America defeats itself” — and that would be accurate, and representative of a trend. But that trend started a long time ago. It started when America was a serious country. How much worse are things today?

As for Iraq that’s a war for Israel it has nothing to do with the US. I hope we lose this one.

Has this ever happened? The political leadership tried to make peace but the military rebelled?”

Algeria

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Algiers_putsch_of_1961