Iraq with no boots on the ground?

Great Debates
1

Could we have done Iraq without ground troops?

I mean a plan roughly as follows:

Start with a surprise heavy bombardment of every site where there was any probability of Saddam being present. Whatever it takes to pound even hardened sites. No buildup, no warning. Today he parties, tomorrow he dies or hides.

Destroy what little weapons capability they might have had.

Destroy every TV and radio station. Include newspapers for good measure. Leave Saddam with no outlet to communicate.

Broadcast 300 channels of cable TV from airplanes flying all over the country. Litter the country with printed news and Democracy 101 pamphlets. Bring the outside in, as they say in decoration shows.

Let them manage, don’t interfere much. Repeat bombings if you get any whiff of Saddam and co.

Air drop whatever supplies or humanitarian help might be needed. Shouldn’t be muich need for that.

I realize there was no way this could have been approved, of course. I am just wondering, wouldn’t civilian casualties have been much lower? Cost to the US? Quicker resolution? Less ill will against the US?

What could go wrong with a plan along this lines? Feel free to propose changes if desired.

2

You’re kidding yourself.

I hate to be so dismissive, but there is simply no way this would have worked.

3

hey, I realize that whether we like them or not, the government has access to some of the finest minds around and pays them to sit thinking about this stuff 50 hours a week. If they didn’t do it like this, this must not be a good way to go about this. I just want to know WHY this isn’t a good idea. I figured a country would choose the type of warfare where they feel they have the advantage. Facing guerrillas house to house is not the best field for the most technologically advanced and best funded military in the world. How did we end up doing just that instead of fighting a war where fancy planes and computers win the day?

4

IIRC, we started shock and awe a day or two early because we had rock hard intelligence that Saddam was camped out in some particular compound. We blew the place to hell, but Saddam wasn’t there at the time.

5

The war in Kosovo. NATO used extensive airpower and still made mistakes like bombing civilian trains, bombing the Chinese Embassy, thinking that we had destroyed hundreds of armored vehicles when just a handful had been taken out… And that war had only a limited goal of driving Serbian troops to quit Kosovo. Depending on who you believe, it was either Russia’s pressure on the Serbian leadership or the possibility of a NATO ground invasion that concluded the bombing campaign after many weeks of less than hoped for success.

Destroying weapons facilities? We really didn’t know where they were, even ignoring the fact that the WMD were not there. There were literally hundreds of suspected sites, many of them huge compounds, not single buildings. Look at one representative site. It is just one location, but there are probably what, 80 or so bunkers or buildings there? Really, there’s only so many bombs we can drop in a day. You can’t expect to attack all these sites, AND every transmitter in the country, AND all suspected hideouts for Saddam, AND all the tanks and helos in the Iraqi army, AND destroy air defenses, AND drop pamphlets, AND drop rations, AND broadcast propaganda. There just aren’t enough airplanes to do all that with any kind of effectiveness. It’d take months to even begin to see results.

And as far as tracking down Saddam, remember it took months even with nearly 180,000 troops on the ground in Iraq. Tracking him down through airpower alone? No chance.

6

More like providing free toilet paper. There’s no way they are going to listen to someone who’s bombing them; the Iraqi’s aren’t idiots.

It would likely miss Saddam, bolster his support, produce chaos, and produce hostility towards the US. It would accomplish nothing, and hurt both us and the Iraqis. It’s a dumb plan, but not as nearly as dumb as what actually happened. There’s exactly one good plan : Stay the hell away.

The goals were to kill Saddam, take control of/suppress Iraqi oil production, build bases, hand out contracts to Haliburton/Blackwater/etc, and rework Iraq into a neocon fantasy utopia. All but the first two required boots on the ground to even try.

7

You couldn’t guarantee getting Saddam. Once he broadcasts that he’s still alive, everything goes back to the way it was.

Maybe a better way (if we absolutely had to invade) would have been to advance the no-fly zones by X number of miles each week/month/whatever. But even then, there would have been an enormous number of different ethnic/religious groups squeezed together in the middle.

8

Saddam was a stabilizing political force in Iraq, not a disruptive one.

Before anyone yells at me, stabilizing does not necessarily mean good. In this case, it means very very bad. But stabilizing nonetheless.

Removing him without putting troops on the ground would just have given anyone with enough guns a green light to take over, and in this case the people with the most guns are the ones we really don’t want in power.

9

ok, a variation of my pland has been tried before and failed.

I wasn’t referring to the fabled WMDs. Just whatever rusty tanks and airplanes they had left from GW1, Army barraccks, airports, etc.

I won’t bother you asking for a cite, but take your word for it. This is, ultimately, the final answer to my question. If we don’t have the capacity to conduct an attack on the scale needed, then that’s that. I do believe that you are envisioning an attack bigger than what I have in mind, but the difference might be too small to bother arguing.

And what’s the point of capturing Saddam? As long as he is not in command, that is all that matters, right? He can run and hide all he wants, escape to Syria and cry on TV a little bit about the injustice of it all. Then people know he is out of power and are free to carry on.

10

It is important they not be idiots, if something like this is to work. They wanted Saddam out, we are removing him for them. We are not entering their country or imposing our lifestyles on them. They would be free to do whatever it is they were imagining to do if it weren’t for Saddam. The problem is of course, that Iraq without Saddam might quickly turn into Iran and the solution would be worse than the problem. But isn’t that what we got now, anyways?

As I said, I don’t think killing Saddam is important as long as he is not in command. I don’t think he had any support to bolster. Chaos is what we got already and this would produce a lot less hostility towards America, I believe, since they wouldn’t be seeing our faces walking around day and night.

This is pretty much my starting point. I don’t see things getting much worse than what we have now, this might be just as bad but at a lower cost.

And on that we agree, but leaving well enough alone is not compatible with the American dream, is it? :wink:

Although I think I smell sarcasm here, this might be what ultimately got us into all the trouble. The goal was not to remove Saddam, but to appropriate Iraq. Ground troops are definitely needed for that. Best way to get Garbage Out is putting Garbage In, right?

11

He could only broadcast from outside Iraq. That would only help reassure people that he is out of business.

:confused: What good are the NFZs? And why would that affect people on the ground? The US could take control of Iraq’s airspace in a blink of an eye, but what would that do?

12

I’m wondering how broadcasting cable tv works.

13

I don’t think anyone could reasonably dispute you on that particular point. “Good” dictatorships are often marked with good infrastructure functioning and development. Disruptive is what happens when one, well, invades a country, for example.

I would hope that the message of “We can destroy you from our air-conditioned fortresses where you cannot touch us” would somehow keep the survivors from trying anything too too stupid.

It would have led to the fracture of Iraq, which I find very desirable and stabilizing. We still wouldn’t like one the pieces, but we could deal with that later.

14

You drop miles and miles of coaxial cable from custom planes, of course.

I mean broadcasting HBO, ESPN, Fox News and the like. Saturate the airwaves with gum-chewing capitalist consumerism. Survivor and Paris Hilton 24/7.

15

After we’ve bombed their airports, destroyed their communications, killed them right and left, and rendered them incapable of defending themselves or maintaining order ? Yes, sure they will. :rolleyes:

Some of them did, some of them didn’t - and I doubt many wanted to have their country bombed, crippled, and propagandized in the process. Nor did they want him to be replaced with nothing, and their country carefully damaged in just the right way to make imposing order of any kind impossible.

They’d be seeing our faces on the TV we are force feeding them. And they’d see the corpses where we bombed them, and are continuing to bomb them - otherwise they’d rebuild their own TV stations, newspapers, and so forth. And they’ll certainly blame us when their society collapsed into chaos with the police and army all dead or disarmed, with massive fires gutting cities without the ability to send the fire department where it’s needed, with the entire country falling into city states or less because no one can communicate, and sundry other disasters.

Since the American Dream can apparently be summed up by the words “greed” and “malice”, yes.

I wasn’t being sarcastic. And I forgot to add another reason we attacked Iraq : to kill people for the sake of killing them. We wanted our regular dose of foreign blood to drink.

Like sending a few thousand of the people who’s lives and country we’ve ruined into those “air conditioned fortresses” as suicide bombers ? Or elsewhere ? How many more enemies do you think your vile little plan would produce ?

Ever hear of Pavlov ? Drop bombs on people while forcing them to watch nothing but American made TV, and they will come to associate American TV with destruction and death. They and others will also likely come to the conclusion that the war is intended in part as a favor to American broadcasters.

What you fail to grasp is that the simple fact that something comes from us will poison it, in the eyes of the Iraqis. That’s what happens when you wreck a country for your own profit and pleasure.

By the way, I’ve come to the conclusion that I was wrong; this is at least as stupid as the Bush plan.

16

You do understand they speak an entirely different language in Iraq, right?

And that one of the many things that annoy Muslims about the West is our tendency to let our women dress and act like whores?

17

Sapo, I think you should also remember what happened in Baghdad after it became clear that the regime had crumbled in April 2003. Once Iraqi police and security forces had either fled or been destroyed, widespread looting broke out, and there was nobody to restore order. (Rumsfeld apparently didn’t see the need to use coalition military as a constabulary.)

Even if we could destroy Saddam’s government through airpower alone, I don’t see why this strategy wouldn’t also result in the same chaos, leading to disorder, leading to violence, etc.

18

Very true. How about we broadcast all the Middle Eastern TV stations. Whatever it is they fancy. News, Variety shows, cooking shows. The point is, give them access to the outside world. Stop the ideological blockade. Let them know their choices, see how their neighbours are doing and how they are doing it. Bring new ideas in.

19

There might have been a better approach here, and that would be to follow the standard template for a Third World coup. First, you develop a faction within the army to take over. Then, the very first thing, you seize all the organs of mass media, particularly the radio and the TV. You begin by broadcasting martial music, then a solemn voice comes on and announces that a National Salvation Front has taken over “for the good of the country,” “to ensure stability and tranquility,” and to “transition Iraq to democracy.” You announce that Saddam is a renegade, and that whoever captures him will get a reward of a million bucks. You announce that you are raising salaries for soldiers, bureaucrats and teachers by 500%. You impose a nighttime curfew, and state that looters will be shot on sight. You ask people to return to their daily activities the following day.

End of story.

20

My “plan” is to do as little damage to the infrastructure as possible. Presidential palaces are out, but the police should remain, as most of their army and their small arms. They should be able to keep some semblance of order. And in the very worst of cases, then what happens is exactly what happened with W’s plan.