Hi tekboy; Re: "I'm not sure I understand: you're worried that after we've won the war and are occupying the country, then some months later on there will some kind of violent resistance by the Iraqi populace against the occupying forces?"
I'm not worried, I'm certain. This is a military fact of life that dates back several thousand years:
(1) If you send boys with weapons into a foreign neighborhood, the local boys will fight them. The exceptions are when you're there helping them get rid of another group of foreign boys (like the Arabs in Afghanistan).
(2) In an occupation, once the fighting starts, it is very difficult to stop it again, except by pulling out. To suppress violence with violence requires extremely high kill numbers. Five to ten percent is enough for most situations, such as was executed against Germany before her WW2 occupation. But these sorts of kill rates are no longer diplomatically possible.
(3) Humans have a higher interest in holding their own territory than they have in controlling foreign territory. This (along with a large number of other factors) gives the defense an intrinsic advantage in an occupation. The US was only able to politically accept 60,000 deaths before Vietnam was given up as a lost cause, but by that time the Vietnamese had taken far greater casualties. This is the point that McNamara didn't figure out until too late.
Israel won its conventional wars with the Arabs quickly and almost painlessly, but never forced the occupied peoples to be peaceful. The above three factors apply to that conflict, except that part number (3) does not apply to Israel proper.
If we copy Israel's foreign policy, we will end up with Israel's problems. And eventually that means living in constant fear. (But before it reaches that point the US will pull out, as our homeland is not in the Middle East.)
Also note that the Vietnam war was not supported internationally, and the result was that the US was isolated diplomatically. This is the consequence of what can only be described as a foreign policy disaster.
-- Carl |
