Iraq Invasion Question

Factual Questions
1

Why was it so easy (relatively) for the US-lead Allies to overcome the military ground forces in Iraq in 2003?

After years of fighting with their neighbor Iran, and tons of sophisticate weapons from the West, the Iraqi forces should have been able to put up a significant defense, but it seems that once the Allies took control of the skies they were able to march almost effortlessly through the desert to Baghdad. So why were the Iraqis so unprepared for the inevitable attack they must have seen coming? Were they hoping that nobody would call their bluff?

And what does this portend regarding an air and ground war against a non-nuclear Iran? Would the same coalition have the same level of success, or would Iran be better prepared to defend Tehran? (I realize that Iran is not a brutal dictatorship like Iraq was, so the Iranian populous would probably fight harder against us than the Iraqi populous did.

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The short answer is that the Iraqi military was overwhelmingly outclassed by the US and our allies that it was like sending an army armed with clubs and slings against one armed with 19th century rifles, cannon and Gatling guns.

Well, they didn’t really have ‘tons of sophisticate weapons from the West’…they had a few newer 2nd or 3rd tier weapons systems from countries like France, but mainly they had a lot of older Russian crap. What they DID have wasn’t all that well maintained, and the training of their troops wasn’t exactly top shelf (to say the least), and we had trashed the cream of their army during the First Gulf War. In the end they were just completely outclassed by such a large margin that they just didn’t have a chance in a set piece type battle. They would have been better off just abandoning all their regular military battle plans and skipping right into the insurgency, since that was the most effective thing they managed.

Probably bordering on debate here, but to me it’s clear that Saddam didn’t realize until too late that things had changed and that the US actually would pull the trigger on a full blown invasion…and by then it was far, far too late to do anything meaningful militarily about it.

We could do exactly the same things to Iran that we did to Iraq, though their military hasn’t recently been substantially defeated as the Iraqi military was in the first gulf war. But yeah, would not be substantially different in the set piece phase of the war…and, the insurgency part would be as bad or worse and we’d still have no real counter to that. Iran would be better off having their soldiers run away from every military facility they have an take up a gun and join the insurgency in the unlikely event the US ever decided to stick our collective feet into that bear trap.

There are a lot more Iranians than Iraqis, but in the end no…they would have no more success fighting a conventional war with the US than Iraq did in the end. Just more targets, as much of their hardware AND training are just as crappy as the Iraqis was. It would be once the dust settled that things would get really, really bad for the US and whoever we managed to trick into joining us.

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Nice response XT.

And if Saddam had poison gas weapons, which we know he did, why didn’t he use them against the Allies as a last resort? It’s not like the Allies would have fought any harder at that point. It might have bought him some time to make a clean getaway…

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Well, he didn’t really have any large stockpiles of usable gas weapons…that’s what we basically found when we invaded. What little there was was a lot of moldering crap that was probably unusable (old artillery shells and the like). That WAS (IMHO) a bluff on Saddam’s part…he didn’t really have the things.

Not that he probably would have used them anyway. That sort of thing is far less effective against an enemy that is prepared for it (as the US and coalition forces were), so it would have done a very limited amount benefit wrt killing coalition troops while probably killing a lot of his own people (not that he would care about that) and hampered his own troops a lot more, which is DID care about.

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I’ll second the good answer from XT. Although I think Saddam knew well before the invasion that we weren’t bluffing–you just don’t move all of those assets in place for a bluff. I think he knew but that there’s really not much you can do with the cards he was holding.

It would be interesting to see the aftereffects of a militarily defeated Iran, and how much of an insurgency they could mount. I could only hope that should we ever let loose there, that we have a clearly defined end state. That seems to be a very hard thing to accomplish these days, and one which people still don’t understand about Gulf War 1–we met the end state, then left. That’s a good thing.

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I’ve read that during the 8 years of the Iraq/Iran war that a total of 800,000 soldiers were killed.

That seems like a huge number of dead for two not very sophisticated armies, but perhaps that’s the point. They kept pounding on each other with relatively unsophisticated weapons in a war of attrition that ultimately ended in a stalemate.

Perhaps that was a clue that we would be able to take control of the battlefield fairly easily.

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Bear in mind that Iraq was under fairly crippling sanctions from the end of the previous Gulf War to the start of the second. It took an awful lot longer for the coalition forces to establish air superiority and to win the ground war the first time.

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Not only that, but the “No Fly Zone” was effectively a license to soften the battlefield almost continuously for ten years before the invasion.

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Bear in mind that the major advantage Iran has that Iraq lacked is terrain. Iran is orders of magnitude more defensible than flat, open Iraq.

10

Rather than increasing the destruction of their own country, and causing their own deaths, I thought the Sunni-Baathist leaders thought it best to blend in, await developments and possibly start insurrections, as they did. An occupying army is more vulnerable than a powerful invading army.

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The US could take out their radar and effectively leave them blind; The U.S. would strike from a distance, especially by air, and just take out huge am’ts of equipment. Do you know how you stop modern enemy aircraft with no ability to track them? You don’t. Also, the mere act of attempting to track them allows you to be targeted.

Was there any item on the checklist of things that the U.S. didn’t have going for it?

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I think this is an important point. To a large extent, the strategy was to not fight a frontal assault, but to set up for an insurgency later. Which was acrtually pretty effective, even if it failed in the end (if it’s not too early still to say that). And I don’t know how many Shi’a were in the defense force, but one would assume that most of them would have not fought against the invasion.

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Autocrats like Saddam Hussein have a love hate relationship with the military. On the one hand it is what keeps them in power, but on the other hand it is the only thing with enough power to overthrow them. The usual solution is to have a large military to cow the populace but one that is not good enough to win a war against a real modern army. The dictator gives all the best stuff to favored units which act as his personal bodyguard and lets the rest go to seed. The average soldier can see how much better the US army is than his and has no desire to fight. Thus the ground part of the war goes pretty easy.
Iran has a Revolutionary Guard which is relatively large and well equipped. They would probably fight more than the Iraqi army did. The topography for Iran would be more difficult and Iran’s military is not degraded by years of sanctions. They would be harder than the Iraqi army to defeat, but they are not in the same realm as the american army and would be defeated relatively quickly.

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The same reason they were so easily brushed aside in 1991 when they were a far more formidable force; the loss of the 1991 war cost them enormous amounts of military material and the sanctions postwar both prevented them from buying replacements for the losses and spare parts to maintain that which remained. The same reason they performed so terribly in the 1979-89 war with Iran (they made huge advances into Iran taking advantage of the disorder of the Iranian revolution, but were thrown out just as fast once Iran recovered). The same reason they were so brutally handled by Israel in the 1973 war when the armored division comprising the Iraqi contribution to the war gingerly walked right into an ambush prepared by an Israeli force 1/3 its size the night before right in front of them without them even becoming aware of the Israeli presence until the firing started due to lack of performing the most basic reconnaissance. The same reason the Iraqi Revolt of 1941 was put down so easily and the small commonwealth force was able to advance on Baghdad despite being outnumbered over 15 to 1. The Iraqi military has always performed very poorly and has had near non-existent morale. The problem in my estimation is institutional in the Iraqi military rather than anything in Iraqi national character, though Iraq being artificially cobbled together doesn’t help matters.

Pet peeve: Iraq’s military hardware sources during the war with Iran were in rough order the USSR, China, France and Britain. By far the majority of their hardware was Soviet or Chinese in origin. Ironically it was Iran who had sophisticated weapons from the West, the Shah had bought his hardware from the US and UK, and the Iranian Revolutionary Government inherited a lot of what was at the time state of the art US weaponry; F-14s with AIM-54 Phoenix missiles, AH-1 Cobra gunships, HAWK SAMs, TOW anti-tank missiles, Harpoon anti-ship missiles, etc. Finding spares for them was very difficult however, so they turned to other sources for new hardware, China and the USSR. That’s right; China and the USSR were arming both sides.

Hardware is only as good as the hands that are using it. When the US left Vietnam a lot of sophisticated hardware was in the hands of the ARVN. It didn’t stop South Vietnam from falling two years later. More importantly with regards to Iraq, Iraq had lost devastating amounts of material in the 1991 war, most of its air force that hadn’t been shot down or destroyed on the ground had fled to Iran and the post-war sanctions cut off any source for replacements for losses or spare parts to maintain what was left. The Iraqi military in 2003 was a pale shadow of what it had been in 1991 when it was thoroughly trounced by the US led coalition.

There is no evidence that ‘free’ people fight better than those living in dicatorships; if anything the opposite is likely to be true. Nazi Germany and the USSR certainly didn’t suffer from any lack of will to fight in WW2, nor did the French under Napoleon, Rome under the Caesars, and democratic Athens fell to the Spartans in the Peloponnesian Wars.

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I think the problem with the Iran-Iraq war was that after they exhausted their imported late 20th-century tech, they reverted to the level of war the sides could support - equivalent of WWI trench warfare… complete with human wave assaults, artillery duels, and lack of movement of the fronts.

The grossest stupidity of the Iraq invasion in 2003 (apart from the invasion itself) was firing the infrastructure of the nation. Even after WWII the allies rcognized that to efffectively govern and keep a lid on things, they needed the policing infrastructure of the Nazi regime until they could sort out who to fire. Iraq was left with no control, and the now unpaid experts on things military were motivated to get even. Add to that, the Shiite-Sunni divide and teh realization by Sunnis that they were going to be targetted by a bigger Shiite population, and they were additionally motivated to stockpile the means to carry on the fight. I also read somewhere that the troops were also planning from the start the fade-and-harass tactics that caused the most trouble. Al Qeda in Iraq was just a bonus…

Then the USA compounded the error by banning Baath party members from many positions. More motivation; more people to jump in. Anyone with education - law, engineering, teaching, etc. - generally needed to join the party to get a government job much as the Communists worked. It was a mistake to equate all these people with Saddam loyalists; it was stupid to turn them against the occupiers.

The other mistake is to assume invaders would be welcome with open arms just because the government was a dictator. If China invaded to save the USA from the Republicans/Democrats, do you think the other party’s supporters would join with the invaders, or would they join together to defend their homeland? Beare about pollyannistic assumptions of other people’s motivations.

The Iranians, for all the appearances of fanaticism, are not stupid either. I’m sure they’ve studied the tactics involved in Iraq, and come away with the best options - lots of hidden weapon caches, IED supplies and studies where to use them, and such. Plus, they haven’t been as starved as Iraq for supplies or equipment. Their best tactic would be to “surrender”. Come on in, please don’t bomb our bridges and power plants, don’t destroy our infrastructure. Surrender the most useless half of the army and half the government that would be captured anyway. Once the occupiers are in place, then the insurgency begins. Why waste men and material in the fight you can’t hope to win, when you can save them for the fight you can win?

The USA would be better off sending in the troops, taking the key positions like nuclear plants and processessing facilities, anti-aircraft installations, air force fields and planes, etc. with commando raids, blowing them to useless, and then walking away within a month leaving the smoking ruins. Leave as few of the old guard government behind as they can manage.

The USA would be best off with no military action.

16

Aside from puddleglum, most people here are making the assumption that the Iraqi military is a comparable thing to a Western military, just worse. There’s also an implicit assumption that Saddam Hussein had total, unimpeded control over everything. Both assumptions aren’t true.

Saddam Hussein’s primary goal throughout his reign was keeping himself on top and alive. The military was useful to him as far as it accomplished that goal; defensive measures were useful as far as they accomplished that goal. Consequently, the logical use of Iraq’s capabilities (at least by 2003) were keeping the populace in line and keeping the major military leaders either fearful of Hussein or happy enough to not try to kill him.

Attempting to improve their defense to the point that it would have been a serious threat to a Western army would not only have been pointless, since any increase in capability could be matched tenfold, but would also have represented a threat to Saddam Hussein himself, since a more capable, better trained military might well have ended up deciding they could dump Hussein and make nice with the West. Similarly, admitting the inevitability of defeat and ordering a fallback into an insurgency would have been tantamount to admitting that his deposition as leader was inevitable, and so the military would have gotten rid of him and made nice with the West. Hussein’s life consisted of keeping his house of cards up as long as he could so that he could live as long as possible. It’s a testment to his political savvy that he DID live as long as he did.

A Western army is an expression of political will as interpreted through a doctrine of national defense. The US armed services, or the UK’s armed services, or the armed forces of Canada or Japan or the Netherlands or whatever, are a branch of the government representing the government’s will to address the need for the use of force filtered through political and budgetary realities. Military objectives are defined, budgeted for, and executed. The Iraqi military was basically Saddam Hussein’s buffer for not getting killed, but like a pack of dogs, he also had to make sure they didn’t turn on him. You can’t view the Iraqi army, especially by 2003, as being an armed forces serving a national interest.

17

Along the same lines, I remember reading that most of Idi Amin’s army (remember him?) were not issued live ammunition in order to ensure that no division had the firepower to stage a coup. Ammo was locked up and guarded by the trusted inner circle. A group of Army men, with or without live ammo, was significantly empowered to cower civilians, however.

Along the same lines, Quaddaffi’s army was split into units, and the stories in the news reported each relative had a group to command. (One of his nephews petulantly demanded a unit to command like his brother had) This guaranteed that any one group had better have a lot of cooperation frm everyone else if they tried a coup; or more likely, any level of communication between the different commanders would be observed by the secret police before planning could get very far; and they all had an interest in preventing a non-family takeover.

18

It’s my understand that that’s exactly the Iranian view of things, and that they are specifically planning in the case of an American invasion for a massive guerrilla war*. They’ve been arming themselves and training for that, not for a standup fight.

Also, Iran has the advantage of being an actual nation, politically speaking, with a general nationalistic sense of loyalty. Not some random batch of people slapped together by foreigners drawing lines on a map in the aftermath of the collapse of European colonialism and held together by brute force since, like Iraq. Judging from history, barring genocide you can pretty much expect them to fight on and off for literally centuries until they win. They won’t give up their identity any more than India or China did.
*Which by the way would not be an “insurgency”, because an insurgency is a fight against the legitimate government, which an occupying army wouldn’t be.

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