The Cubans were construction workers expanding an airfield. They were nominally part of the Cuban military but they weren’t combat troops.
Well, that’s the rub. Our goals were never well defined and they were so nebulous and grandiose that they just don’t seem realistic, either now or even at the time. If our goal was to install a functioning democracy in either country then that is definitely a fail. But we certainly removed both regimes, and prevented or perhaps mitigated terrorists from training in either country with the support of the regime in either country…for a time at least. So, it’s hard to say win or lose in either case, as it’s a complicated mess. That’s why I conceded that it’s debatable. 
The problem I have with saying that regime elimination was our goal is that it doesn’t fit in with our continued presence in Afghanistan and Iraq. We drove the Taliban regime out of power in Afghanistan around December 2001. We drove the Baathist regime out of power in Iraq around May 2003. If our goal had been eliminating the existing regime in those countries we could have declared victory in both cases within two months and withdrawn our forces.
But the reality, of course, is that we still have troops stationed in Afghanistan and Iraq. (It’s mind boggling to realize that we now have troops serving in Afghanistan and Iraq who hadn’t been born when we invaded those countries.) This seems to say that we had military goals in these countries that went beyond just eliminating the regimes that were in power.
Logically speaking, it could also be that the goalposts shifted, or were never clearly defined to begin with. I would draw a distinction between military goals (take this position, kill this person) and overall goals of a war.
~Max
Well…to a degree. Our actual goal was to eliminate the regimes AND the terrorist training camps and support by the governments. I agree that we also had as a goal the installation of a stable democratic government that would become US allies (and buy our stuff of course, as well as sell us what we wanted, especially in the case of Iraq), and those goals were clearly either out and out fails or, at best, very partially successful and mainly fails.
It is mind boggling that we are still even partially in either country after all this time, though when you consider our system it kind of makes sense. No one wants to be the president or administration that gives up and pulls out to fail as we did in Vietnam, and so if there isn’t any sort of overwhelming public outcry over it things just kind of keep on, with a gradual, slow withdrawal which we’ve seen from each administration after Bush.
At this point, ‘win’ and ‘lose’ has really lost all meaning with both countries, and it’s all about an exit strategy that allows us to not be threatened again by either regime or the situation there. I think the surge of ISIS several years ago is all that really kept us in Iraq to any meaningful degree, and the fight with the Taliban in Afghanistan, but even that seems to be fading away as a large scale threat. In fact, I’d say that as with Europe, the US is in the process of disengaging in the entire region, as our interests have shifted and it’s no longer considered, by some anyway, as critical to the US to be involved there. Right now, the focus seems to be on Asia, but I see the US as basically disengaging outside of the country more and more. JMHO and all that.
I agree. I feel this is an unfortunate drift in foreign policy that would best be addressed by a regime change here in America.
Some 100 to 200 were combat troops but they were all armed and trained.
I’ve read “citizen-soldiers”.
~Max
The issue of ‘what’s a war’ was much discussed during the Korean conflict. I got drafted (joined USAF) so I considered it at least warlike.
You are correct that winning means attainment of your goals. In Korea the goal was a unified Korean peninsula. We lost half of the country to the Chinese Army. We lost.
In Viet Nam we were defeated and we had to break and run.
I’ll yield to the accusation of being hyperbolic with regard to Grenada. However, at the time,
The initial goal was repelling the North Korean invasion of South Korea. We achieved that.
It’s true that during the war, it looked for a time like we might kick the communist regime entirely out of Korea and we shifted our goal to that. But when China intervened, that became impossible and we shifted back to our initial goal. So I think it’s reasonable to judge our overall success in the war by our main goal rather than the one we temporarily assumed.
I would liken the Korean War to what might have happened if we had gone from Desert Storm (the Gulf War) straight into the Iraq War, and then failed to oust Saddam.
Take back Kuwait and leave it at that? Victory.
Take back Kuwait, and try but fail to oust Saddam? Draw at best.
As far as the present conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan, I’m in the “it almost doesn’t matter anymore” or “if you call this is victory, I’d hate to see what you call defeat” category on the pessimistic side, but if I were an optimist I’d call both conflicts TBD, pending how things play out when we finally do withdrawal (and we did withdrawal from Iraq for a few years, starting in 2011, but we see how that turned out).
I don’t get where you could say “We changed the regime but it changed back” in either case. I mean, ISIS certainly gave it a go, and the Taliban still isn’t out for the count, but I wouldn’t exactly say either country has “changed back.” Yet.
I’ll admit I was being a little flippant. My point was that I feel our goal was to eliminate the hostile regime and help establish a stable non-hostile regime. But in both cases, I feel all we did was eliminate the particular hostile regime that was in power and open things up for a different hostile regime to take over. (Although in Afghanistan, it’s possible it might end up being the same hostile regime.)
Again, I have to question your history. Korea was partitioned after WWII, like Germany. A separate North Korean government was established in 1948.
The North invaded the South in 1950. The response was never intended to unify the country, but to protect the fragile South. That was successful. In fact, the South has never been invaded again.
Would the UN Troops have liked to destroy the North Korean army and unify the country? Sure. That doesn’t make it the goal of the conflict. Nor does failing to destroy the North mean that we lost the war. The conflict ended with the borders essentially where they started. It was a stalemate, which means neither side got what it wanted.
This is wrong. Our initial goal and the over all goal was to defend South Korea from a North Korean invasion, and in fact the UN charter for this specifically said that. Once that was achieved, the US did decide to extend the goal to a conquest of the North…when the counter attack we used to break the initial invasion allowed it…but to say that it was a fail because we didn’t achieve that extended goal is simply wrong.
I have searched the web and do not find any timeline detailed enough to recount events as I remember them. The closest is this short reference:
“By dawn on October 26 the situation on the ground was perilously close to a debacle. But American might was finally turning the tide.”
As I said, the police had held the ground and the US had to send in 2 battalions to overcome them.
The accounts agreed, however, that the airport was being constructed openly to facilitate tourism. In fact some of the resident contractors building the airport were from Miami.
Since the goals of the invasion were unfounded, so were the claims of victory. The same is true of Iraq. Wolfowicz claim that we would save the oil for the US and that alonw would pay for the invasion. We did not achieve our goals. Read Bremer’s “My Year in Iraq”.
Obviously you are correct.
At the time however, we were basking in the propaganda of WW2. We were the good guys with the bomb who marched into town with bands playing and crowds cheering - that’s winning. Korea was a bloody slog through the mud. WW2 veterans who had established civilian lives were recalled and had little choice but to remain in the military. Those were the Sergeants and Officers I served under. The war dragged on and on. It didn’t end. No peace treaty has been signed. It never looked like we won.
South Korea is still there and still free. That was the goal. It would have been nice to liberate all of Korea…certainly it would have been better for the Korean people, IMHO anyway…but during the cold war, protection of the status quo was the real goal in most cases. And the fact that China poured in, literally, millions of soldiers along with lots of Soviet aid made it nearly impossible for the US (also, this wasn’t JUST the US, but a UN initiative) to ‘win’ in that manner. I think a ‘win’ would have meant nuclear war to one degree or another.
After all, before the Chinese intervened and the USSR started pouring in aid the US and allies had already conquered most of North Korea. The NK military and political leadership had been pushed up into the mountainous region on the border with China, and it was pretty much all over at that point…until millions of Chinese soldiers attacked the strung out UN forces harassing the remnants of the NK military.
And that’s the problem. People assumed that’s what winning looked like. WWII was the only conventional war with a conventional destruction of the other side in the 20th century for the US. (Really shouldn’t count WWI, since that just stopped.)
Ever since then, we’ve been extrapolating off a single data point, always a futile and fatal procedure. You’d think that given 75 years to learn better, people would stop. But as long as WWII is within living memory and celebrated with self-congratulatory propaganda, its story will triumph over common sense.
The above is a view I wish more people shared. WWII was the anomaly, not the norm. Likewise with the peacetime draft that immediately preceded it and followed for decades after. People should stop thinking of it as the standard to be achieved and instead see it as the exception, brought about by the most dire circumstances, that it was.
Well yes - propaganda is the issue, and now we can select our propaganda on radio and TV.