Historians and buffs, has there ever been a war where the aggressor could not be attacked on their

[mahina]

Last edited Sun Nov 6, 2022, 01:21 AM - Edit history (1)

Territory?

Update: contiguous territory? Thank you!

[RockRaven]

1. Kinda depends on "could not" and "their territory" definitions...

Various episodes from British history come to mind, for example.

[DFW]

2. if Taiwan has no offensive weapons, and China decides to take it back by force

I guess we'll find out.

[Swede]

13. Taiwan announces it could target Three Gorges Dam with missiles to deter China

&ab_channel=SpotlightonChina

[malaise]

15. That would be just another Western allies

Proxy war.
That is all.

[EX500rider]

27. How would China attacking Taiwan be a proxy war exactly?

Taiwan produces many of their own weapon systems.

[shelshaw]

3. Revolutionary war comes to mind

[EX500rider]

17. John Paul Jones raided a English port

And completely circled the islands while attacking shipping

[ProfessorGAC]

23. That's Likely More Logistics

There's no technological or logistics barrier to hitting Russian territory in this case.
So, not sure the revolutionary war addresses the point.

[unblock]

5. Like the whole of European colonization?

How much of the wars of conquest of africa or the Americas took place in Europe?

[Scrivener7]

12. Good point.

[malaise]

16. Great post

That is all

[ProfessorGAC]

24. A Matter Of Capability

Perhaps the OP should have framed the question as a modern warfare question.
Do you think the Aztecs or the Bantu wouldn't have hit Europe, if they could?
In this case, the capability exists.

[EX500rider]

28. Mostly because one side had no ability to project their forces on another continent.

Not because they held themselves back.

[WhiskeyGrinder]

30. This is the answer.

[The Unmitigated Gall]

6. Well, shit HAS been blowing up on the orc side of the fence

With exciting regularity.

[Earth-shine]

7. Roman Empire?

[EX500rider]

29. No, Rome had many invasions starting with the Carthaginians and ending with the Visigoths nt

[sarisataka]

8. Many. In recent history

The Falklands war comes to mind.

[EX500rider]

19. I don't think it was a matter of wouldn't so much as couldn't in that war

Argentina just didn't have the reach to attack the UK.

[sarisataka]

36. I view Argentina

As the aggressor

[EX500rider]

41. Most certainly and a stupid one at that to attack a 1st World military like the UK..

...esp with Margaret Thatcher at the helm, did they think she would roll over? lol

[muriel_volestrangler]

20. While references above to colonial wars are valid, I don't think you can say the UK

was the "aggressor" in the Falklands War.

[sarisataka]

37. I don't view UK as the aggressor

That is why I believe it fits.

UK certainly could have used its carriers to launch an attack on the Argentine mainland. Politically however that was not possible. (Militarily the risk far outweighed any benefits but that is a separate issue)

[muriel_volestrangler]

38. Ah, I took the OP to be whether it was militarily possible

not whether it was politically possible (or "wise" ). I would say that some might have seen an attack on an Argentinian military target (like an airbase) as politically possible, if very risky. The General Belgrano ship was attacked, after all.

[sarisataka]

39. The Belgrano is what came to mind

There was some controversy as it was sunk just outside of the exclusion zone. The debate was if that was "illegal".

Ultimately it was deemed a "fair' attack, even by the Captain of the Belgrano, I think an attack on Argentine mainland, even a pure military target, would have swung much public opinion against the UK.

[EX500rider]

42. They considered it (attacking Arg. air bases) and did deploy SAS on the ground in case.

[pecosbob]

9. Determining the identity of aggressor and victim of conflicts can be a slippery slope

Vietnam for example.

[Just A Box Of Rain]

10. One could easily argue that China was a co-belligerent in the Korean war,

as the Red Army was involved directly in the fight (even if all the parties in pretended otherwise).

Truman sacked MacArthur over the latter's desire to attack beyond the Yalu River (China). That was line not to cross.

[Kaleva]

11. The Winter War? Korean War?

[Bucky]

26. In the Korean War, the aggressor was very much attacked on their own territory

By Nov 25, 1950, the aggressor was nearly entirely conquered by the UN forces. Had MacArthur not pushed too far, there'd be no Kim family today, and the Cold War would have gone very differently.

[EX500rider]

31. Except for the million or so Chinese who "volunteered" to fight there.

We left China alone.

[Bucky]

33. Actually the Chinese invasion was a response to MacArthur bombing north of the Yalu River

There was a military provocation on the part of the UN forces. I don't know if he was hitting supply depots on the Chinese side or if things simply got messy (as things tend to do in broad military actions.)

It's a good object lesson and how military confrontations can spin out of control if the superpowers don't keep their proxy wars on a tight leash.

It seems to be a useful lesson to draw from history at this moment

[EX500rider]

43. No, I don't think so, the Chinese had been planning it since it started:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Korean_War#China_intervenes_(October%E2%80%93December_1950)

China justified its entry into the war as a response to "American aggression in the guise of the UN".[223] Later, the Chinese claimed that US bombers had violated PRC national airspace on three separate occasions and attacked Chinese targets before China intervened.
They "claimed" that to give them a fig leaf to hide behind.

[malaise]

14. Hmmmmmmmm

Vietnam, Iraq.
The aggressor was the US

[EX500rider]

18. I wouldn't say Vietnam

North Vietnam was attacking South Vietnam and we were helping South Vietnam.
North Vietnam was definitely the aggressor which is obvious as once we stopped helping South Vietnam the north took over the South two years later.

[thucythucy]

32. "North Vietnam" and "South Vietnam" were colonial fictions

foisted on the Vietnamese people by various foreign powers, France and the US being the most salient, during the negotiations to end French rule.

The division was a compromise that was only supposed to last until democratic elections were held. The Diem regime, supported by the US, refused to allow the elections and began slaughtering anyone who favored them. Eisenhower in his memoir admitted that, had elections been held as had been agreed, Ho Chi Minh would have won by a landslide.

To say "North Vietnam" was attacking "South Vietnam" is like calling the American Civil War "the war of Northern aggression."

It ignores the actual history of those conflicts.

[Bucky]

34. North and South Vietnam were concrete realities responding to the random line drawn by colonizers

[thucythucy]

35. But the division was never recognized by the vast majority

of the Vietnamese people.

Had it been left to them there never would have been such a division. So to say North Vietnam "invaded" South Vietnam is to buy into the colonialist mindset.

Besides which, until the massive American intervention, beginning in 1965, most of the armed resistance in the south was local. So the "invasion" by the north wasn't much of a thing until the "invasion" by the US.

Which, by the way, was done without the permission of the Diem regime. Diem rightly believed that turning what had been an internal struggle into "the American War" would rally nationalists who had been anti-communist to the NLF.

The arrogance of US policy makers of the time was, in retrospect, just breathtaking. According to David Halberstam, during this period there wasn't a single senior State Dept. policy maker working at the Southeast Asia desk who even spoke Vietnamese. If they knew a second language at all, it was French.

Vietnam remains one of the worst US foreign policy blunders of all time. Both the US, and especially the people of Vietnam, are still suffering the consequences.

[Kid Berwyn]

21. Bingo.

Last edited Sun Nov 6, 2022, 10:57 AM - Edit history (1)

One seldom hears “Golf of Tonkin” on TV for a reason.

LBJ swore up and down North Vietnam attacked the US Navy with torpedoes, officially.



Who knew LBJ was lying, apart from JFK, who was dead.

LBJ Tapes on the Gulf of Tonkin Incident

Source: John Prados, The White House Tapes
(New York: The New Press, 2003)

Excerpt…

President Johnson: and he's saying you've got to study it further, and say to Mansfield, "Now the President wants us, you, to get the proper people." And we come in and you say, "They fired at us. We responded immediately. And we took out one of their boats and put the other two running. And we kept our..., we're puttin' our boats right there, and we're not running on in."

Secretary McNamara: And it's hard to destroy.

President Johnson: That's right

Secretary McNamara: Right. And we're going to, and I think I should also, or we should also at that time, Mr. President, explain this Op Plan 34-A, these covert operations. There's no question but what that had bearing on. And on Friday night, as you probably know, we had four TP [McNamara means PT] boats from Vietnam manned by Vietnamese or other nationals, attack two is lands. And we expended, oh, a thousand rounds of ammunition of one kind or another against them. We probably shot up a radar station and a few other miscellaneous buildings. And following twenty-four hours after that, with this destroyer in that same area, undoubtedly led them to connect the two events.

President Johnson: Well say that to Dirksen.

Secretary McNamara: That's what I know he'll like.

President Johnson: You notice Dirksen says this morning, that "we got to reassess the situation, do something about it." I'd tell him that we're doing what he's talking about.

Continues…

https://nsarchive2.gwu.edu/NSAEBB/NSAEBB132/tapes.htm

Same reason no one ever hears how Kuwaiti ambassador’s daughter lied to Congress.

Back in 1990, the Kuwaiti ambassador’s daughter testified she was a nurse who saw Iraqi troops pull babies from incubators and leave them in the cold hospital floor to die?



Excerpt...

Hill & Knowlton produced dozens of video news releases at a cost of well over half a million dollars, but it was money well spent, resulting in tens of millions of dollars worth of "free" air time. The VNRs were shown by eager TV news directors around the world who rarely (if ever) identified Kuwait's PR firm as the source of the footage and stories. TV stations and networks simply fed the carefully-crafted propaganda to unwitting viewers, who assumed they were watching "real" journalism. After the war Arthur Rowse asked Hill & Knowlton to show him some of the VNRs, but the PR company refused. Obviously the phony TV news reports had served their purpose, and it would do H&K no good to help a reporter reveal the extent of the deception. In Unreliable Sources, authors Martin Lee and Norman Solomon noted that "when a research team from the communications department of the University of Massachusetts surveyed public opinion and correlated it with knowledge of basic facts about US policy in the region, they drew some sobering conclusions: The more television people watched, the fewer facts they knew; and the less people knew in terms of basic facts, the more likely they were to back the Bush administration."78

Snip...

In fact, the most emotionally moving testimony on October 10 came from a 15-year-old Kuwaiti girl, known only by her first name of Nayirah. According to the Caucus, Nayirah's full name was being kept confidential to prevent Iraqi reprisals against her family in occupied Kuwait. Sobbing, she described what she had seen with her own eyes in a hospital in Kuwait City. Her written testimony was passed out in a media kit prepared by Citizens for a Free Kuwait. "I volunteered at the al-Addan hospital," Nayirah said. "While I was there, I saw the Iraqi soldiers come into the hospital with guns, and go into the room where ... babies were in incubators. They took the babies out of the incubators, took the incubators, and left the babies on the cold floor to die."83

Source: https://www.prwatch.org/books/tsigfy10.html

The Big Lie goes back to Nov. 22, 1963: the real Players are the War Party.

[malaise]

22. You nailed it

As always

[lpbk2713]

25. The Spanish-American War didn't take place in Spain or America.

I don't know if that meets your criteria or not. But Cuba and the South
Pacific Islands were Spanish occupied territories not Spain per se.

[iemanja]

40. Vietnam

Iraq, the US war on Central America, the French invasion of Mexico, the Spanish and Portuguese conquests of the Americas. I'm sure there are many more.