If it is, do Americans think that's a good plan, and that we can we pull it off?
Pull it off? Yeah, we could pull it off. We might take tens of thousands of casualties, but we could pull it off. Defeating a tank army out on an open plain is quite different from defeating guerillas in house-to-house, street-to-street urban warfare. And if even half the other Arab nations (or their people) decide to join the fight, it becomes a REAL problem. To finally win might require the use of nukes. Or the acceptance of hundreds of thousands of casualties and a major war.
I think the Rman Empire may have just decided to take on Quinctilius Varus.
After Julius Caesar's conquest of Gaul in the
mid-first cenury BC, it was Augustus who made
the first and last proper attempt to conquer Germania. The campaign hadn't gone too
badly, and the boundary had been pushed back around a hundred miles east of the
Rhine, when a disaster ended all attempts to subdue the region. In AD 9 an
incompetent commander, Quinctilius Varus, responded to a minor disturbance
involving the Germans by taking three whole legions through the Teutoberg Forest,
where, unable to coordinate themselves, they were of course ambushed and
massacred. After this Augustus recommended that future emperors didn't try to
invade Germania.
acutecomics.uklinux.net
Probably the greatest disaster suffered by the Romans was the defeat in the Teutoburg forest
when the former proconsul of Africa , Publius Quinctilius Varus, together with three legions (XVII,
XVIII, and XIX) , six cohorts and three squadrons of cavalry (alae) were practically slaughtered.
lbdb.com
"Quinctilius Varus, where are my legions?"- -reportedly a lament by Augustus heard in the Imperial palace in moments of military crisis. |
