philippe
FYI, I chase trains.
the war has happened, the CIA just covered it up.
My bad, it's 2 am in the morning, and I have a lack of knowledge in petty south-american continent.
Totally unexpected wars
- Thread starter RedRalph
- Start date
the war has happened, the CIA just covered it up.
My bad, it's 2 am in the morning, and I have a lack of knowledge in petty south-american continent.
the war has happened, the CIA just covered it up.
My bad, it's 2 am in the morning, and I have a lack of knowledge in petty south-american continent.
You might have thought of the war between Bolivia and Paraguay, the Chaco War. A war in which the paraguayans proved once again to be toughest people on the planet, defeating a country with 3 times their population.
TheLastOne36
Deity
- Joined
- Jan 17, 2007
- Messages
- 14,045
Didn't the Paraguayans like lost 2/3 of it's population in that war though?
Bugfatty300
Buddha Squirrel
^^^ That was the Triple Alliance War. c.80% of Paraguayan males died. Chaco War was a resource war in the 1930s over an somewhat worthless area of savanna-like land called the Gran Chaco. Paraguay won but they ironically got the crappy parts of the area. Petroleum prospecting was more art than science back then.
Shekwan
Kim Chi Quaffing Celt
So did Bolivia drink Paraguay's milkshake?
Bugfatty300
Buddha Squirrel
Bolivia was left with the areas nobody cared about and those turned out to have some oil and gas deposits.
^^^^ Yep.
Paraguay won the war and got to keep 2/3 of the Grand Chaco as per the Buenos Aires agreements. They believed that there was oil in the Chaco, but ironically only Bolivia's 1/3 had anything worthy.
The Triple Alliance War Paraguay lost, and quite badly (and has not recovered until today if you think about it).
Paraguay won the war and got to keep 2/3 of the Grand Chaco as per the Buenos Aires agreements. They believed that there was oil in the Chaco, but ironically only Bolivia's 1/3 had anything worthy.
The Triple Alliance War Paraguay lost, and quite badly (and has not recovered until today if you think about it).
Shekwan
Kim Chi Quaffing Celt
Interesting stuff guys, I've never heard of the Chaco War. You can always count on oil for starting a bit of a war.
By the way the milkshake thing was just me indulging in my obsession with the quote from There Will Be Blood:
By the way the milkshake thing was just me indulging in my obsession with the quote from There Will Be Blood:
Cheezy the Wiz
Socialist In A Hurry
The best part about the Chaco War is that Bolivia spent pretty lavishly on fancy new technologies, and the Paraguayans just used second-hand crap but superior tactics and beat the living snot out of Bolivians with it.
They get a lot of crap for the War of the Triple Alliance, but they really performed rather well, given their circumstances. The losses they managed to inflict on the Triple Alliance were astounding, and their defense was pretty genius, right up to the end.
But in both wars Paraguay paid horribly; it was bankrupted by the Chaco War.
Paraguay is the unluckiest country in the universe, and yet I have to admit I love it. When I go to Ciudad del Este and the salesmen talk among themselves in freakin' Guarani I know they are talking about the best way to rip me off, but I still love them.
They deserve to get crap about starting a suicidal war (though never say it to their faces), but you gotta respect their fighting spirit.
Paraguay isn't even in the running for the unluckiest country on Earth. Hell theres 10 African countries I can number off the top of my head that had more bad luck then Paraguay.
You gotta keep in mind that being unlucky is not a precise synonim for being a hellhole.
But there hellholeness is a by product of there unluckiness.
Cheezy the Wiz
Socialist In A Hurry
Oh it was a hell of a war, but I think they get more credit for being willing to stand up for themselves and their interests, even against a huge nation like Brazil.
Eretz Yisrael
Korean Conscript
I HAV ONLY respect for the Paraguayians for able to stand such a dictator and defend their country against the Brazilians and Argentinians. And they had superior tactics.
philippe
FYI, I chase trains.
ah Kafka2 wrote that the biggest hellhole on the planet was paraguay. let me dig that article up.
http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=46386
http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=46386
Lockesdonkey
Liberal Jihadist
Neither of those was out of the blue.
South Ossetia: Mikheil Saakashvili's favorite pastime is annoying the Kremlin. The word that virtually everyone uses to describe him is "brash." Tensions over Abkhazia South Ossetia had been building for years, and with Russia on the make again, the Russians have been egging Georgia on.
Israel-Hezbollah: This stemmed out of a hostage situation. Granted, it's not every day that Hezbollah manages to take two Israeli hostages, but hostage taking is par for the course in that conflict. The Israeli response was bound to be disproportionate; "kill one of us, we'll kill ten of you" is a cornerstone of Israeli defense policy (a highly questionable and irrational one if you ask me, but that's another matter). Beyond that, Israel was due for a proper war, Lebanon was in transition, and people in the know said Hezbollah was itching for a fight--they had been gaining strength and wanted to prove it. They did so most spectacularly.
And while the specific circumstances of the wars were somewhat unexpected, nobody wakes up one morning, sniffs the air, and says "There's going to be a war today." Neither of these wars would have surprised anyone.
generalstaff
Steadfast
I have to agree there, mainly because it looked like they hated both sides too much to join either one.
Not really. The Soviets were looking to expand, the Korean War was brewing since 1946, and the Argentinian dictator was having political troubles and needed a distraction.
The war I find surprising is the Spanish-American War, only because it was a war about nothing and was started on the grounds of no real evidence and against a country which did not cause any problems for the US (I know it sounds a lot like the 2003 Iraq War, which for some reason was not that surprising).
The US had been making noises about Cuba off and on for a very long time, on various grounds. If it was surprising that the Maine's explosion would have provided a dandy pretext for an ultimatum, especially after the rioting in Havana and the general American opposition to Weyler and his ilk...
As for 'no real evidence' and 'against a country which did not cause any problems for the US', there was evidence aplenty of Spanish atrocities (overblown as they may have seemed, they still did take place, and hundreds of thousands of Cubans were put in concentration camps), and besides, when has 'problems' been a real reason for war anyway?
