Hi Nadine Carroll; Re: "Yes, the army would melt away, but why would it become a guerilla force? What would these guerillas be fighting for? An end to American occupation? Why, when our stated goal is to establish a more democratic government and then leave? Who thinks we want to occupy Iraq permanently? You think they're going to piss our vastly powerful army off to get something they can get by waiting? Talk about human nature, when a vastly superior force rolls in, it's human nature to lay very low and try to get a measure of what that force really wants and intends to do, because if you can live with it, why commit suicide uselessly?"
Your analysis is brilliant, except that it is fully from our own point of view. As I've noted before, failing to see things from the other side's point of view, along with selective perception, is the cause of failures in prediction.
The current crop of US military leaders (i.e. Colin Powell) were in Vietnam. While they were there, they pissed their pants and had to clean their buddy's guts off of their uniforms. You think that's bad, you should have seen what happened to the other side's guys. The enemies shooting at them were civilians who should have loved America, according to your analysis, or at least laid low. Of course the US soldiers in Vietnam knew that the civilians hated them, and sometimes this led to violations of the Geneva Convention. The whole experience was painful and traumatic for them, and they don't want to go through it again with Iraq.
It was the school of very, very, very hard knocks that forced the US military to give up simplistic analysis of civilian behavior.
-- Carl |
