"The South surrendered at Appomattox, and the North has been surrendering ever since."
"The South surrendered at Appomattox, and the North has been surrendering ever since."
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/12/opinion/sunday/the-dangerous-myth-of-appomattox.html?_r=0 …
Catastrophic success.
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After World War II, a state of war endured into the 1950s in the occupation of Japan and Germany. And in the recent wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, the United States military’s work had barely begun when the fighting stopped — and the work continues, in the hands of American-backed locals, today.
While it is tempting to blame the George W. Bush administration for these recent wars without end, the problem lies deep within Americans’ understanding of what wars are. We wish that wars, like sports, had carefully organized rules that would steer them to a satisfying end. But wars are often political efforts to remake international or domestic orders. They create problems of governance that battles alone cannot resolve.
Years after the 1865 surrender, the novelist and veteran Albion Tourgée said that the South “surrendered at Appomattox, and the North has been surrendering ever since.” In so many wars since, the United States won the battlefield fighting but lost ground afterward.
With the benefit of hindsight, we can learn, as Grant did, the dangers of celebrating too soon. Although a nation has a right to decide what conflicts are worth fighting, it does not have the right to forget its history, and in the process to repeat it.
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the rest - god save america from itself:
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/12/opinion/sunday/the-dangerous-myth-of-appomattox.html?_r=1
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