Hi Nadine Carroll; Re: "Even if they're not crazy about the Americans marching in, who is going to fight for Saddam? I mean, really fight, not look for the first chance to surrender?"
You're still looking at this as if it were being done in the deserts of Kuwait. In Kuwait, and in the Southern parts of Iraq, the Iraqi Army had two choices: (a) surrender, (b) die. Of course they surrendered.
But that is not where Saddam has put his defenses (as you yourself recently noted). In urban areas, a losing army has 3 choices, not just two. The third choice is to take off your uniform and hide your gun. This is the choice that is preferred, and it will be the choice that most Iraqi Army soldiers would take, in the event of a collapse of the Iraqi Army. For that matter, it was the choice taken by most of the Afghans who were (forced) to fight on the side of the Taliban.
There are very few historical examples of armies that surrendered in droves in urban areas of their own country. The reason is that the soldiers instead melt back into the population. This is a universal fact of human warfare, and is why you won't see huge numbers of soldiers "surrendering" in Baghdad, just as you did not see huge numbers of soldiers surrendering in Afghanistan (relative to the size of the army which was 3 million men. Hell, they couldn't have even fed that many PoWs.)
It is a fact of military history that in their home territory, armies melt away, they do not surrender. If an occupying force is worried about the soldiers, they have to go house to house. Humans are not stupid, so of course almost everyone says that they were never in the military, LOL!!!
After the army melts away (and in the face of a US assault, believe me it would), the soldiers become civilians and the war becomes a guerilla war. With Afghanistan, the US had a history of helping the locals repel foreign invaders (first the Russian Communists, and then the Arab Taliban), and a history of providing the locals with food assistance, so the guerilla war is relatively sedate. But our history with Iraq is one of confrontation. There is no good will. And unlike the example of Germany or Japan, we have not terrorized the civilian population into accepting unconditional surrender. Israel is in the same fix with the Palestinians, in that Israel has not killed enough Palestinians to cow the rest into accepting a permanent Israeli victory.
Re: "Our proper worry should be Saddam pulling a Samson, giving the orders to his cousins in Iraq ..."
The US military is fully prepared to minimize casualties from the pathetic stuff that Saddam has. We've been working on stuff to make our soldiers safe against Russian WMDs for 50 years, Saddam is just not in that class.
Re: "... and terrorists outside of Iraq to use the WMDs."
I also don't think this is such a big deal. It's tougher to argue about this, but my take on it is that most of the so-called "WMDs" that Iraq is supposed to possess are not very devastating. What they're best used for, like the Anthrax last fall, is scaring civilians. Since there will be no invasion of Iraq (I believe) we will just have to disagree about this. We won't find out.
-- Carl |
