Hi geode00; Re: "If assymetric warfare is about PR and the 'hearts and minds' then why wasn't 90% of the activity about hearts and minds instead of shock and awe?"
There was a fairly widespread belief that since Saddam Hussein was a bad leader, US troops would be welcomed in the same manner that they were greeted in Afghanistan. And there certainly was plenty of "shock and awe" dropped on Afghanistan, so it's not exactly that shock and awe is incompatible with good PR.
The problem in Iraq is that we are their historical enemy, and have been dropping bombs on them more or less continuously for several decades. Of course they were going to shoot at our troops when they finally got the chance.
It's not that the Bush administration was so remarkably stupid in thinking they'd be received by grateful Iraqis. They were encouraged in this by a lot of people in the area who had reasons to want Saddam out of power. Looking at what www.debka.com (and Nadine) was saying at the time, it's clear that there were a lot of Israelis, supposedly the people with the best intelligence for the area, wanted us in Iraq whether it would be happy for us or not. The left wing in this country was also fairly quiet about expectations of a guerilla war. Instead, they were going on about how the war should be sanctioned by the UN. Of course if the UN had lost its collective mind and gone in, they'd have been shot up too.
No the real stupidity of the Bushies was in failing to appreciate that there were no WMDs. But again, as in the question of how the Iraqi people would greet us, they were fed lies by people who had vested interests in getting of Saddam, and the left wing was fed the same stuff.
If you want the military to look good in performing a regular war, you send them against an enemy who is weak. A good example of this would be Saddam's Iraq, but as a conventional war, not a guerilla war. If you want to see the military look good in performing an antiguerilla war, you need to send them into a place where the guerillas don't have many friends. This happens now and again, for example, look up the details on the guerilla war between Britain and Indonesia.
-- Carl |
