Dumbest Wars of the Millenium

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
21

How about the Franco-Prussian war ?

Prussian premier Bismarck provoked Napoleon III by publishing a (heavily edited) version of the Prussian king Wilhelm’s conversations with the French ambassador. The topic of the conversations: Problems concerning the successor to the Spanish throne. What is more, Prussia and France basically agreed on the subject, and king Wilhelm didn’t want to go to war - he was at a spa in Baden-Baden when hostilities started.

Napoleon III took the bait, declared war and got his proverbial butt kicked. When the smoke had cleared, France had lost Alsace-Lorraine (Elsass-Lothringen) and Germany had been unified under king (now emperor) Wilhelm.

Hmmm - on second thoughts, this war probably only counts as dumb from the French point of view: Bismarck got exactly what he wanted.

22

I also would like to throw in a nomination for the Iran-Iraq War of 1981-1987 (?) that killed 500,000 troops. It was fought for something like seven years over a few islands in the Euphrates Delta.

It was also a war that featured such niceties as the use of poison gas by Iraq and Iran sending young boys ahead of their soldiers into minefields in the name of Allah.

This battle of wits was settled in a treaty that saw what I think was the territorial equivalent of Staten Island change hands.

23

Hey, theuglytruth, I think that war was also over the prime real estate in the swampy delta region of the Shatt-al-Arab waterway.

How do you determine who won in something like that???