i tekboy; Re: "After that, if you assume no coup and eventual unconditional surrender of the military (with Saddam dead in a bunker), then the fun begins."
I agree with you that conquering Iraq should not be a problem, and that the military will unconditionally surrender fairly quickly. But the problem is the civilians, not the military.
Wars in which one side wins with "maneuver", followed by an occupation, tend to be the ones associated with high amounts of guerilla warfare. Examples of this would be the Franco-Prussian War of 1870-71, and the German conquering of France in 1940. It takes about six months of occupation before guerilla warfare is organized. Both the above wars had this sort of delay, and we've seen it again with Israel's occupations.
When France was first invaded in WW2, Hitler kept his troops (at least in the West), on a short leash as far as atrocities go. The locals were surprised that the same German soldiers that had burned cities and libraries, taken hostages, used civilians in human shield attacks, and shot thousands in reprisal for imaginary incidents of guerilla warfare were now quite polite. Hitler was well aware of the bad propaganda effect of the WW1 atrocities, and that they had likely been caused by panic among German troops rather than by real guerilla warfare, and gave strict commands to his troops that they be on their best behavior.
It was only six months later, with the appearance of the Resistance, that the Germans began atrocities in occupied France / Belgium in WW2.
When soldiers get shot up by civilians, they tend to shoot back at the wrong civilians in reprisal. Our own troops have already shot up an apparently unarmed SUV in Kuwait when one of the Kuwaitis in it pulled out a cell phone. This sort of treatment tends to make a percentage of the locals suspect the foreign troops of evil designs on them, which increases the support they give to the resistance.
It's very easy for the guerillas to operate because all the foreign soldiers are suitable targets. On the other hand, the foreigners have great difficulty figuring out who is on their side and who they should shoot. They inevitably begin to realize that the only effective way they have of destroying the opposition is to simply kill people in cities that support the opposition. If they do enough of this, it will terrorize the locals into clamping down on the guerilla activity. But "enough" is a hell of a lot.
Violations of the Geneva Convention toward civilians supporting guerilla activity is not some bizarre and rare accident of warfare, but is extremely common in these situations. The undeniable fact that we're already having trouble with this in Kuwait, our very close ally, surely indicates that in Iraq itself, with 10 years of sanctions and hostilities between us and them, it would be a monumental problem.
-- Carl |
