Wrong usage of "versus"

Question

A friend of mine has written:

"Iraq! You gave us a war! vs., we'll give you Haftsin."

Isn't this sentence wrong? AFAIK we can say: "Iraq, you gave us a war; but we['ll] give you Haftsin".

I have never seen vs. like that in a sentence and I feel it is incorrect, but since I am a foreigner learning English I thought it's better to ask.

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ps. Haftsin (meaning 7 Ses) is a tradition in Iran in which we decorate somewhere (at Nowrooz, which like Christmas is the beginning of the year) using seven things which begin with Sin -which is the equivalent letter to S in Persian.

Answer 1

This sentence looks wrong. You can judge it for yourself - just replace vs with its definition to check if the resulting sentence makes sense. For example, Merriam-Webster defines versus as either against, in contrast to or as the alternative of. It's clear that none of these is appropriate in your case.

However, the sentence you proposed may be improved as well. You have two independent clauses, Iraq, you gave us a war and we'll give you Haftsin, which can be joined by either a semicolon without a conjunction

Iraq, you gave us a war; we'll give you Haftsin.

or a comma followed by the coordinating conjunction but

Iraq, you gave us a war, but we'll give you Haftsin.