Hi CobaltBlue; On the strength of Saddam's regime, in terms of local support for a US invasion.
The revolutionaries in Iraq already had their chance, in 1991. While the North had its rebellion, and the South had theirs, the middle did not. Saddam did not fall.
Has it changed since then? It may or may not have, there's no way to be certain. Humans are amazingly fickle creatures, and even if you ran a poll today and found out whether the population was for or against a US invasion, the opinion would be different tomorrow. One can never predict in advance what, for example, Saddam might say to his population and how that might resonate with them. Humans who are in populations under attack by foreign powers don't usually give a hell of a lot of credence to what those foreign powers say, but instead listen to their own leaders (Churchill and all that). Since there's no way to be sure, the military will have to plan for a full scale invasion.
Maybe not, maybe the locals will cheer us. Let's make you a test case. Imagine you live in Baghdad. Your eldest son was drafted into the military in 1990. He was sent to invade Kuwait and came back a cripple. He tells stories of how the Americans butchered the retreating soldiers on the road to Basra. Your younger son reached draft age and is now in the Army. You worry every day that the US is going to drop a bomb on him. You watch Iraqi TV (rather than CNN), and it's clear that the Americans have been bombing residential neighborhoods for 10 years.
The men you know say that the Americans are cowards who kill with machines, and that if only Iraq had better technology the Americans would leave them alone. The TV says the same thing, and it seems to be logical. You remember what life was like in Iraq before the Gulf war, and while it wasn't the best thing on the planet, the fact is that if you kept your nose clean (like 99% of the Baghdad population), you were safe, and the only thing you have available to compare it to is what life is like now, when the Americans have been trying to "help" you for most of a decade.
So for 10 years Iraq has had tough times. Your husband has had great difficulty finding work and you know that this is due to the sanctions that the Americans placed against your country, sanctions that the neighboring countries try to smuggle past all the time. You worry about the health of your little grand daughter, since her mother isn't getting enough to eat.
You remember the Gulf war very well. American planes snuck in under cover of darkness and you personally know a people (or know people who know people) who lost property or were wounded in the attacks. Certainly you probably know of far more people who were killed by Americans in the Gulf War than, for example, the average American knows who was killed at the WTC.
So you have a lot of very personal reasons to dislike the American military and government, if not the American people. Now, the question is this. Will you be able to transform your personal negative experiences with the Americans, your relatives who were maimed or killed, everyone's financial difficulties, and the very personal fear you felt of American military action into an intellectual appreciation of the Americans plan to run your country for you? And what is that plan? The Americans say that they want to have free elections, but you know that the Americans support an Israeli government that suppresses democracy in Palestine, and you have the usual human tendency to discount government propaganda.
I doubt you could intellectualize the conflict, or that the inhabitants of Baghdad could intellectualize what the US has done to them to that extent. Instead, when your neighbors quake in fear, the natural human response is to look to your leaders for comfort. That's why Bush's ratings, in the face of an obvious economic downturn, nevertheless went up after the WTC. War does not divide people, it unites them. And since Saddam is still in power after 10 years, I would guess that this natural human tendency has been present in Iraq.
The American problem in Iraq would be the control of civilians. There are essentially zero examples of civilian populations that were brought under control (in the military sense of allowing an invasion without resistance) by blockade tactics. You can sometimes get the government to toe the line, but blockades and starvation, in and of themselves, always pisses off the locals more than it makes them love you. To get the civilians under control you have to put them in actual fear for their lives and our actions against Iraq are nowhere near deadly enough for that effect to kick in.
Example: When the Allies starved Germany for most of a year after the Armistice in 1918, the result was not that the population of Germany became true lovers of Democracy and the West. Instead, the population provided the tinder for Adolf Hitler to take over. Within a few years they got their revenge.
Example: When the North blockaded the South in the war between the states the effect was to cause economic devastation in the South. Did that win the Civil War? Of course not, to win the war the North had to actually march through the South and make it clear that the Southerners who didn't toe the line would be killed. And this was in the face of the fact that the Southerners had to be aware that the North had no particular malice towards them.
Example: When Germany blockaded Britain in WW1 and WW2, and caused the population to suffer such that, for example, people were only allowed to buy new shoes every 3rd year (or something like that), did the British react to it by developing a warmth and compassion for the Germans? No, the British fought on.
Example: When Britain blockaded the US in the Revolutionary War and the War of 1812, causing economic devastation, did the US quit fighting? No, the US fought on, and the wars only ended when the British got tired of fighting.
So much for examples where "sanctions" (i.e. blockades) failed to pacify civilian populations.
Unlike Kuwait, Iraq has not been invaded by a foreign power. Unlike Afghanistan, Iraq is not run by an external force (i.e. Osama bin Laden and the mercenary Arabs). So the Afghan liberation example does not translate directly into Iraq. And for that matter, the Northern Alliance lost many thousands killed in their assaults on the Taliban, and that was with the Taliban having no prior experience against US military activity. The Iraqis, by comparison, have received constant, on the job training in how to deal with the US and its air force for 10 years.
Unlike Afghanistan, we can't simply arm the local rebels and provide air support. The Kurds in the North are too much of a problem for Turkey, our ally (i.e. the weapons would inevitably infiltrate back across the border and be used against the Turks), and arming the Sunnis in the South would essentially be giving weapons to the Islamic Fundamentalists that are our target in the terror war.
-- Carl |
