Comment by eynsham | Hacker News Reader

Comment by eynsham | Hacker News Reader

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I’m not sure we actually disagree: the Americans started out far too confident in their abilities and their view of what they can do now is, tempered by two decades of fighting, much more realistic. A loss of confidence, even if caused by a collision with reality, is still a fairly accurate description when taking into account what you point out.

The French I think have a much more accurate understanding of their abilities. The reversals they suffer have been far fewer and less disastrous than those the Americans face. For example, in Chad, the FACT is now certainly on the back foot—even the opposition media who previously seemed to think that the FACT had a good chance of taking N’Djamena have stopped suggesting that that’s a possibility and now focus on ructions between Déby fils et frères. Meanwhile in Afghanistan, the Taliban’s hold on its strongholds is pretty much secure, and they may even retain some cities.

Maybe we don't disagree, but it just seems to me that is a very strange way of looking of analyzing things. There is so much talk about confidence and who believes what, both the state itself and the people and media.

You point at some things the media believes and that is of course a different question compared to what the government itself believes.

> The French I think have a much more accurate understanding of their abilities.

Funny then that they thought they can overthrow Gadafi only then to literally begged the US to intervene as they totally failed.

>The reversals they suffer have been far fewer and less disastrous than those the Americans face.

Well if you try far less you can lose less. But of course also if you have far less, even those much smaller loses are just as big a deal as the much larger loses for the US.

I must admit I am not all that informed on the details of French wars in different African countries. So I can not speak on those details.

> I must admit I am not all that informed on the details of French wars in different African countries. So I can not speak on those details.

I think this is somewhat in tension with the tenor of your claims above, e.g.—

> Well if you try far less you can lose less. But of course also if you have far less, even those much smaller loses are just as big a deal as the much larger loses for the US.

Of course Gaddafi is a reasonable example in the other direction, but I’d point out that Françafrique is still entirely under Francophile dictatorial rule—even the CNSP is content to permit French forces to remain; it was Macron who threatened to pull out. Contrast this to Iraq (lost to a great extent to Iran). I suppose there is increasing CAR-Russia coöperation, but given Françafrique’s scale, the CAR is much less important than Iraq.

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