"Never get involved in a land war (or car service price war) in Asia."
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In my native tongue(Urdu) and region(South India), we have a saying that goes like this-
"If you wish to destroy a persons fortunes, advice him to start a transportation business".
Reminds me of a similar English saying: "How do you make a small fortune in the airline business? Start with a large fortune!" I imagine we can generalize that to transportation in general.
Douglas Macarthur said this ... (or part of it) and then wound up fighting the Korean War ... which we won.
So ... never say never, I guess.
Dunno if I'd say "we won." Technically North and South Korea are still at war. And apparently MacArthur said that _after_ the Korean War.
Can you find a definitive link?
I find this ...
"MacArthur articulated his most famous dictum—“never get involved in a land war in Asia”—after the Japanese surrender, because he believed that Japan’s simultaneous war in China made his Philippines victory possible. Japan had annexed Manchuria in 1931, then invaded China in 1937" [ http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2014/05/rethinking-do...]
We acheived our goals of stopping the Communists from conquering a friendly nation; so it's a victory.
No, we intervened in a civil war between two groups, one that we decided was more in our interests to support. And we opened 2 markets for arms to be sold to, that would be healthy vibrant markets (for arms) for the next seventy years.
Did you win the korean war?
Nobody won the korean war. It was a draw,a stalemate.
The US won on the South, they won on the North. The war officially never ended.
Given how South Korea has turned out compared to North Korea; given the US saved South Korea from an unbelievable amount of death and suffering that would have come with the North's domination; compared to the disaster that Mao's China was, and Stalin's Russia, due to Communist rule; considering South Korea became a tremendous ally; yeah, we very clearly won.
Fun fact: until 1960s, North Korea had a higher GDP per capita than South Korea. Somehow I can't find any definite source on the web, but here's one phrase I found:
https://books.google.com/books?id=D1dOCgAAQBAJ&pg=PA191&dq=d...
> By the beginning of the 1960s, North Korea's economic development was much more impressive than was South Korea's and would remain so until at least the mid-1970s. (...) As these data make abundantly clear, without foreign aid, the DPRK could not have achieved its ambitious post-war reconstruction.
Another fun fact: even with all the help from the US (for which I'm grateful), South Korea went though an unbelievable amount of death and suffering all the same, and our first president was a first-class mass murderer who would have been quite at home in the company of his Northern counterparts. So, yeah, somehow we ended up all right (after decades of tyrants and struggles), but the history is a lot more complicated than good guys saving half of the population from bad guys.
Another fun fact is that a lot of the modernization and economic expansion experienced by Korea up to the end of WWii came about from the at times brutal colonization of the Korean peninsula by Japan which transformed an agrarian subsistence society into a more urban and the second most developed country in Asia after imperial Japan itself.
That's a very creative interpretation of winning a war: if we were to apply that to Germany and Russia, then Germany had won its last war against Russia
South Korea is a dictatorship, under-developed country (even less developed than North Korea) before 1980s.
One major reason North Korea is shit today is because Soviet fail and international embargo.
The socio-politics won, not the war. By your own measure, only half of Korea won - the other half didn't win.
Given how South Korea has turned out compared to North Korea;
Shifting the goalposts. The fact is, both sides pledged to fight until the other was (politically) annihilated. Both sides failed to meet that goal, or even come close to it. Despite 2.5m+ killed or wounded, and a landscape in ruins.
I think it might have been meant as a Princess Bride quote.
Princess Bride gets the quote from Mcarthur. (and I'm not the one(s) downvoting you btw)
After some digging, it looks like either McArthur or Montgomery expressed the general sentiment first. But the specific formulation in GP is a direct quote from Vizzini in Princess Bride.