In the sense of sucessfully pacifiying the population. Methods such as putting the entire civilian population in internment camps; retaliations against families; collective guilt and punishment; the near-genocide of males of fighting age. The US and it’s coalition partners could never resort to these methods for political reasons, but somehow I don’t think an insurgency like this could have survived in Stalin’s USSR.
You wouldn’t need that level of brutality to pacify Iraq. Just put Saddam back in power and give him funding and support until he gets his old systems reestablished and under control. In about 10 years the Shiites in Iraq would be crushed beyond imagination and you’d have a return to the status quo ante.
Obviously just because something might work doesn’t mean it’s justification for doing it. Saddam has proven that he can pacify the Iraqi countryside, but that doesn’t mean we can morally even seriously consider becoming Saddam ourselves.
Stalin was a bit different from Saddam in how he dealt with dissent, but yeah, this type of insurgency could not have been established in Stalin’s USSR. He routinely purged anyone who he even suspected of being a leader of dissent, and if a specific area was looking like it might rebel or something he’d surround key population centers and starve the populations to death.
They worked for Saddam.
Sure, they’d work, but once you start that sort of thing, you can’t stop, or even seriously moderate yourself. If you do, people tend to rebel or escape. It would also underline the pointlessness of this disaster even more, since Saddam was already doing just that.
Also, because you can’t let up, it’s something of a trap. It doesn’t so much pacify dissidents as suppress them, which means we’d need to stay there indefinately to keep up the pressure, or install Saddam 2 ( and in that case, we should have kept # 1 ).
As Martin Hyde pointed out, we already have Saddam I - who needs Saddam II ?
It would be interesting to see whether Ba’athists would re-form
My hunch is that they would
The two stupid things are that nobody realized that Saddam was the equivalent of Henry VII and that nobody pointed it out to him.
“They make a desert and call it a peace.”
– Tacitus
Such ‘total war’ solutions (and I use Raymond Aron’s terminology) do work - if, by work, you mean you reduce or exterminate the population to such an extent that all resistance active or passive ceases. The first modern ‘total war’ pacification was, I contend, the second Boer War (1899-1902) in which the British invaded the territories of what is now South Africa, defeated their opponents’ regular forces and guerilla forces and then ‘pacified’ the white resistant population through a system of concentration camps in which condition were, by the standards of the day, very harsh.
This campaign of forced ‘hamletisation’, pacified the civilian population to such an extent that the territories becase willing and valuable allies in both the First and Second World Wars.
This policy of ‘hamletisation’, as it became to be known, was used again successfully and with refinations that supposedly made it more humane against the Mau-Mau uprising in Kenya and, with spectacular ‘success’, against gigantic Communistic uprising in Malaya in the 1960s (proving that it is more than possible to win a jungle war in Asia).
However, it could be argued that inj its final form ‘hamletisation’ was neither sufficiently sweeping nor applied with sufficient ruthlessness to be called a ‘total war’ solution.
In any case, such solutions may bring the end of hositlities but not really victory. Was it Tacitus or some other classicial historian who said: ‘They made a desert and called it pease’?
Maybe.
But maybe not.
The genie’s out of the bottle now. Saddamn Hussein didn’t just appear on the scene and start kicking ass, after all; he ascended to power in a state that already had a degree of Sunni predominance and that had all the apparati of state in place.
Recreating that? Not so easy. Now the Shi’ites would know what was coming.
There is a parallel with Yugoslavia here,the various ethnic groups although ancestral enemies lived peacefully cheek by jowel with each other for years,even intermarrying under an autocrat,but as soon as that autocrat died …
What would the point of internment camps and mere near-genocide be? I mean, we have neutron bombs and chemical/bioagents. If our goal is to make Iraq peaceful and we’re not restrained by morality or political pressure, then we can do so really damn fast. After all, dead is very peaceful.
[insert your own My Lai joke here]
If it can’t even be done (who’s got the power?), then there’s no value in considering it.
Nah, Saddam had to fight considerably to get Iraq under his thumb, and he had to put down some pretty serious rebellions after the first Gulf War. I do not doubt that with the backing of U.S. finances he could do it again. Remember, the government that he took over was one he helped build from the ground up, and he was in charge of security in said government.
Iraq was pretty unstable before Saddam.
Which makes “recreating that” harder, not easier. Even harder than it was for Saddam, who at least was an Iraqi and a Muslim.
No, they didn’t.
Why do we want to “pacify” Iraq? We don’t just want to pacify Iraq because we want to pacify Iraq. Pacification isn’t an end, it is a means. We want a peaceful Iraq because then we won’t have troops dying, we won’t be spendings so much money there, we’ll get the oil flowing again. There won’t be an expansionist anti-American dictator there, Iraq will be prosperous, it’ll have an open civil society, and so on.
And none of that can be accomplished by genocide. If all we want is to get the oil flowing we could just retreat from the cities and let them bomb each other all they like, and pull back to defend the oil wells and pipelines.
So how exactly are we helped by “harsh” measures? How do they help us accomplish our war aims, or, now that we have little hope of accomplishing our original war aims, how do they help us minimize our losses? If we just want to get out of the fighting we can pull our troops back home and let the Iraqis fight among themselves.
Maybe the OP is a bit extreme, but I have always said that in a place like that, you pretty much need a dictator to keep peace, democracy isn’t going to work everywhere. While I don’t condone the killings, there was less killing and more stability than there is now.
Sure they did. Saddam made some horrible blunders like invading Iran and invading Kuwait, but he was able to keep his own country together through tyrannical and oppressive means.
Barely, through constant killings, torture and revolts. He had to use nerve gas on his own people.