At 02:36 PM 3/20/03 +0000, Ken Brown wrote: >Despite what Eric Cordian and others have said here, I think it unlikely >that there will be a big body-bag outcome for the US. The force balance
>is so overwhelmingly one-way, and most Iraqis really don't want the >current Ba'athist government. A lot of them will give up quickly. Could >be wrong of course. >... >Large-scale House-to-house fighting unlikely. Iraqis don't have that Bill of Rights bullet item that bars troops in houses. Picture a few tens of K of lone (or paired) well armed RK loyalists holed up in spare rooms with families. Whose job is to impede progress into the city. Who know they are eventual toast if the locals are no longer held by fear. >And in a 1-party plutocracy like Iraq, that means with the Ba'ath party >still intact, maybe even including Saddam's Tikriti friends & relations. >They run most military & large business organisations & huge parts of >civil government & media. After the city is ours, we let natural tendancies operate for a few months. Ie, payback time. The citizens know who needs to hang better than we do. The blind eye lets the eye-for-an-eye cleanse society. We'll of course save a few of the bigger trophies for wartrial photo-ops.
