<the population in Iraq does not necessarily support the Baath and other insurgents and foreign jihadis in the way you imply. Certainly no more than the Afghans suppport the Talibans.>
Lawrence of Arabia said that, in order to wage a successful guerrilla war, you only needed the active support of 5% of the population.......as long as the other 95% do nothing to help your enemy.
That's the situation today, in Iraq. A small minority is willing to take active measures against America. But nobody, not in Iraq, not throughout the entire Muslim world, is willing to help us. Bush has gone, hat in hand, begging everywhere for troops from Muslim nations, and everyone has told him no. Not a single Muslim nation is fighting beside us; that alone guarantees our defeat.
We have created a variety of armed groups of Iraqis, in an attempt to create local proxies. Consistently, every time we ask these forces to fight their own countrymen, they refuse, or desert, or even join the "terrorists". Given how Saddam treated the Kurds and Shiites, it should have been easy for us to play the old colonial "divide and conquer" game. The failure to create any quisling forces, is another guarantee of our eventual defeat.
In the 1920's, the Brits held elections in Iraq, and set up a "local" King to run things, and pretended Iraq wasn't a British colony. But it was all a sham; all real military/political/economic power was in British hands. And, when the Iraqi nationalists fought them, the Brits used their new air power, to drop chemical weapons on villages that supported the guerrillas. Winston Churchill (a young man then, working in the Navy) wrote with approval of these methods. This is the "colonialism by proxy" model, that America is following today, in Iraq and Afghanistan. Or trying to. |
