CONTRARY WISDOM: The U.S. shouldn't have occupied Baghdad
By STEVE SAILER
UPI National Correspondent
LOS ANGELES, Calif. Feb. 27 (UPI) -- Ten years after the liberation of Kuwait, almost all Americans seems to believe the U.S. military should have pushed on beyond the terms of the mandate that President George Bush had requested from the U.N. and conquered all of Iraq. Yet, a reasonable case be made that President George Bush and Chief of Staff Colin Powell made the prudent decision in calling off the ground war in the Gulf after only 100 hours.
First, conquering Baghdad, Saddam Hussein's capital, would have killed far more American soldiers and Iraqi civilians that the freeing of Kuwait did. By late February 1991, Saddam's goal was no longer to hang on to Kuwait. Survival, both political and personal, was all he cared about. Thus, he moved many of his most loyal and well-equipped divisions back to central Iraq, leaving untrustworthy troops to absorb the brunt of the Allied onslaught. Not surprisingly, these betrayed remnants surrendered in droves.
The Allies would have eventually crushed Saddam's army, of course. (Whether they would have caught Saddam so the he could be tried as a war criminal, though, is another question. An extraordinarily wily survivor, Saddam might have escaped to a well-bribed neutral country.)
Besieging Baghdad, however, would have presented a vastly different military challenge than did the famous "Left Hook," in which Army M1A1 tanks roared 50 miles per hour through the desert behind Iraqi lines.
Famed military historian John Keegan wrote in "The Second World War," "Capital cities, with their maze of streets, dense complexes of stoutly constructed public buildings, labyrinths of sewers, tunnels and underground communications, storehouses of fuel and food, are military positions as strong as any an army can construct for the defense of frontiers."
The Siege of Berlin at the end of World War II (April 16 to May 2, 1945) showed how costly the taking of a capital city could be even for an attacker with overwhelming numerical advantages.
Although outnumbered about nine to one, the exhausted German defenders managed to inflict 305,000 casualties on the Soviet Red Army. The slaughter of German civilians was also enormous: 125,000 Berliners died.
If Saddam's best units had managed to put up only 1% as strong a resistance in defending Berlin, that still would have left 3,000 American and British troops dead or wounded.
America's overwhelming firepower might well have killed 10,000 or more Baghdad civilian residents. This would no doubt have alienated other Arab nations who had uneasily joined our coalition.
Second, the post-war era would have been even more chaotic and dangerous if American had occupied Iraq.
We like to dream that we could have converted Iraq into a peaceful democracy, just as we did with Japan and West Germany after WWII. The peoples of those two great industrial nations, however, had at least already learned how to work together with trust in the economic sphere. American proconsuls Douglas MacArthur in Japan and Lucius Clay in West Germany could thus extend that heritage of peaceful industrial cooperation to the political sphere.
In contrast, democratic "nation building" in Iraq probably would have turned out about as well as it has in Somalia, Haiti, Bosnia, and Kosovo.
Further, occupying Iraq would have presented the U.S. with severe geopolitical dilemmas.
Immediately after the war, Saddam's ethnic enemies within Iraq - the Shiite Muslims in the south and the Kurds in the north - both rebelled. If we were running Iraq instead of Saddam, we would have been presented with the same urgent question: Do we let the Shiites and the Kurds break free and set up their own nation-states? Or do we fight them to keep Iraq whole? It would have been extraordinarily distasteful for us to capture Saddam, only to then take on his favorite pastime of crushing breakaway elements.
Yet, for us to allow Iraq to break up into three small states would have badly destabilized the balance of power in the Persian Gulf.
As the stalemated Iraq-Iran war of 1980 to 1988 showed, those two bitter rivals are perfectly matched against each other. If Iraq had broken into three mini-states, however, Iran would have become the dominant regional power. This would have been especially troubling because the new Shiite state centered on Iraq's Persian Gulf oilfields would have shared its religion with the Shiite theocracy of Iran. This would have paved the way for the Iranian army to threaten Kuwait's independence.
Further, if we'd allowed the emergence of a wealthy Kurdish state in the north with control of the Mosul oil fields, we would have greatly provoked our own valued ally Turkey, in which Kurds make up 20% of the population. A country of four million Iraqi Kurds would likely have funded rebels among Turkey's thirteen million Kurds.
The Kurds are one of the most numerous peoples on Earth without their own state. Rightly or wrongly, though, the Turkish government has long viewed Kurdish separatism as a mortal threat to that fragile republic. America has long sided with the Turks in their bloody struggle with Kurdish separatists because Turkey is our favorite Muslim Middle Eastern country. That's because its government is trying, against long odds, to make it into a secular European country.
So, while the outcome of Desert Storm was hardly ideal, it was about as good as could realistically be hoped for in the Middle East, that junkyard of statesmen's dreams.
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