President Bush and his advisors have declared that their goal in attacking Iraq is “regime change”, i.e., to overthrow the present government there. I’m trying to figure out what their strategy is.
Defeating the Iraqi army in the field is not a problem. It will be relatively easy to isolate the major cities, primarily Baghdad. But then what?
Perhaps they hope that an anti-Saddam coup will take place and a government will be formed more to the likeing of the US. Maybe so.
But what if that doesn’t happen? It is by no means certain that that it will. Then we are faced with a situation of a seige of Baghdad with its five million residents slowly starving or a house to house and street to street urban war with horendous casualties among the civilian population.
Either situation will precipitate a profound political crisis in the Arab world accompanied by huge demonstrations which will force the governments of the region to condemn the United States and will strengthen the hand of Islamic fundamentalism in the region. Huge demonstrations would also probably rock European cities.
From what I have read, the officer corps of the US armed forces has profound misgivings over the prospect of this war, but are being overruled by the ideologs advising Bush. Doesn’t sound like these people have read their Sun Tzu.
So how do you think Bush & Co. have thought this through? Maybe they see something that I do not.
I would also add that if such a situation does develop and the US is forced to withdraw because of intense political pressure with Saddam Hussein still in the saddle, it will be a profound political defeat for the US.
PBS’s Frontline program did a piece on this subject sometime back. Apparently, the US has quietly tried to do something like this in the past, however, in each case it failed miserably because the US didn’t hold up its end of the bargain, and the Iraqi’s massacred the folks we’d been talking to (mainly Kurds). I would imagine that the military folks are planning a strategy along the lines used in Afghanistan (i.e. we supply lots of fire power, why most of the ground fighting is done by native opposition forces). There are, of course, benefits and drawbacks to all of this. The benefits are that there’s relatively little loss of US forces, the drawbacks are that it looks kind of cowardly to lots of folks. Also, I’ve got to wonder if there’s enough folks left in Iraq who’d have the courage to fight if/when we start attacking Iraq.
I don’t think that there are too many factors in common in the two countries. I also think that when one’s country is attacked, it is the normal mode to fight back to defend kith and kin. The dynamic is far different than that of an army dispatched to foreign soil.