The following article explains some of the thoughts I shared earlier in another discussion. There was some debate in US media whether it was right to predict a “cakewalk” in Iraq. Some are still debating, whether it was. I say, yes it was. 3 weeks! Thats all it took to gobble up a country the size of Iraq. Whether by side-deals with the commanders or 15,000 lbs bunker busters, the fact is they are now occupying perhaps all major cities and oil fields in Iraq. Yes, it’s a cakewalk.
So why was it so easy and what does it tell us about the future? This op-ed published in this Philippines news site gives a stark warning. Some excerpts
And so it was impossible for Saddam Hussein to sustain with any degree of effectiveness anything more than a token conventional force. How could he? Ten years of a brutal embargo where even painkillers for little children screaming from the cancer caused by US depleted uranium shells could not get through the British and American blockade. What more the complex, expensive and heavy machinery needed to maintain a modern conventional force?
The US must have known this. That is why it was so insistent on going in. It knew that the only danger to itself from the invasion of Iraq would come from the moral anarchy its illegitimate action would create in the world. From then on it would be every country for itself. Thucydides was right. The strong will do as they please, the weak will suffer as they must. Unless they combine with the less strong and become pretty might together. The situation truly cries out for a Russo-Franco-German axis for law in international affairs.
Was it likely that Iraqi armed forces would stick in the Second Gulf War to the same strategy and force structure that was wiped out in the First with hardly any casualties on the US and British side except from friendly fire? Just how stupid are Iraqis supposed to be?
Pretty stupid not to figure out by now why US and British forces are allowing looting in the streets. The looting helps prove the original White House position that Iraqis are unprepared for democracy and that a military dictatorship would be the best form of government to succeed the crazy one deposed so that the US can exploit Iraq’s oil with the only sort of security it can enjoy: military repression.
Already Iraqis are protesting that the very same Gestapo who picked up their husbands and sons never to return them, are back in the streets doing what they know best: kick ass and restore order in the anarchy that demands their presence. Then for Saddam; now for the States. Hey, same first letter. Put them together and you have SS.