"Stay Behind" strategies in Iraq

[Major Variola (ret)]

At 12:42 PM 4/10/03 -0700, Tim May wrote:
>1. Iraq has been a welfare state for essentially its entire lifetime.
> From the 1920s to the 1960s, a typical backwater royalist welfare
>state. Since the 1960s, a socialist/central planning/fascist state.

You could say much the same about the US...

> since much of the population has no independent source
>of income, no factories producing stuff that the rest of the world
>wants to buy, the effects are obvious.

Nothing the world wants to buy?  Forgotten about the oil?

It is sufficient for a country to sell raw materials, it does not have
to process them, or make elaborate things to sell.

The peasants have their labor to sell, and the oil companies will
buy it.

>(Germany and Japan were in different situations: each had substantial
>armaments, vehicle, steel, etc. facilities. After being repaired, and
>perhaps after shifting for a while to making motorcycles and lawnmowers

>and such, these industries re-emerged and aided in the rebuilding. We
>all know their names: BMW, VW, Mitsubishi, Toyota, etc. Iraq has far
>fewer such industries, per capita. Offhand, even with their 30 million
>population, I cannot think of a single "Made in Iraq" item, from even
>before the 1990 events.)

Look in your gas tank.  The contents are Made in Iraq.  Esp. since
Calif. requires low sulphur fuel and Iraq's oil is especially low
sulphur.

Iraqis making widgets makes as much sense as the US making TVs.
Don't bother, others can do it cheaper.

>They will be a handout state for the next 20 years, perhaps longer.
>There is little chance that investors will pay to rebuild their
>infrastructure, given the lack of ability of the peasants to pay.

The peasants get work in the oil industry there.  How is this
different than german or jap peasants working in postwar
factories?   (Germany and Japan had manufacturing histories,
unlike Iraq, as you say; but they had no oil to export.  So you
sell what you can sell.)


> If
>viewed over the long term, the cheering today as his statues are
>toppled is relatively minor if the U.S. is ultimately forced to
>withdraw  (for whatever reason) and the heirs to Saddam get back in
>power.

After WWII, the US realized it had to use ex-Nazis to keep
Germany running.  But it went after the top guys, even 30 years
later.  Why do you think Iraq will be different?

(Modulo perhaps more Iraqi sniping after the US occupation than
was experienced in Germany.  Because of the Palestinian/Osama-mecca
thang)

The US *does* have to deal with Israel/Palestine to calm some
potential snipers.  Since abandoning the region is not an option,
regrettably, the US will have to force this.  The USG probably
knows this is the only way to remove motivation from some fraction of
the
potential Iraqi-occupation-snipers.  (The "get out of Mecca" folks
like Osama will not be satisfied by this, but some Arabs will.
The Osama snipers will not be restricted to Iraq, but operate throughout

the region.  In fact, the other American outposts (Saudi, Kuwait, etc.)
might be softer targets than the Iraq-occupying troops due to
complacency.)

But again, the US can handle mil deaths overseas now.  This isn't
Lebanon or Ethiopia under Clinton, where we exit at the first
sight of blood.  (Alas.)

>* Most importantly, as the infrastructure continues to be in sad shape
>and as 30 million continue to live essentially as beggars, resentment
>of the occupation force can only grow.

Don't you think the occupation planners know this?   Don't you
think they'll use psyops and jobs (paychecks by Halliburton)
to calm most who can be calmed?

I think its completely evil to invade another country, but its
also clear Mr. Hussein wasn't terribly popular, for good reason.

How many post-war occupation mil casualties the US can tolerate
is an interesting question, as are US strategies to avoid these
(eg, use lots of Iraqis and lots of UN fodder).  But I think,
and it is an empirical matter which we'll observe in coming
months, that Iraqi occupation will not be abandoned even
if the US continues to take hits.

We'd also look bad in different ways to different third
parties (eg, abandoning to the humanitarians; weak to
the neighboring governments)

>Yeah, a lot of Iraqis are waving U.S. flags and photos of Rambo
>(seriously)

I saw one waving a flag with a Harley plastered over the stripes...

and saying "We love Bush," this is the enthusiasm of the
>moment. Wait until a few years have passed and they still haven't
>climbed out of the poverty of Liberty City (the slum formerly known as
>Saddam City). (Because a slum of a few million people has essentially
>nowhere in the world ever climbed out of poverty, even in
>well-developed countries with strong free market systems. At least not
>in the past several decades. Reasons left as an exercise.)

Some of the poverty was due to the government control of resources
and how it spent it.  Face it, Iraq has plenty of wealth to pay back
investors and locals.  All you need is enough warships to guarantee
that you *will* recover costs.

And a major oil producer not in OPEC will be a major tool for the USG.

>Meanwhile, there will be groups with access to the offshore accounts,

not so easy

>to the buried supplies,

If that's a real problem then look into investing in ground-penetrating
radar equiptment.
Not just for archeologists any more...

who will have a very strong incentive to into
>power. Getting into power means control of the billions of barrels of
>oil.

Exactly.  Exactly why the US won't let go.

>Neighboring countries will find that it's to their advantage to keep
>the U.S. bogged-down in Iraq. The last thing Iran, Turkey, Syria, or
>even Saudi Arabia wants is a Westernized state in their midst, a base
>to launch other "liberations" from.

Oh, you mean like Kuwait, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Israel, Jordan?

So though they'll pay lip service
>to the idea of being happy Saddam is gone, they'll be sure to keep a
>trickle or even a river of terrorists and supplies heading into Iraq.

A good way to get JDAMNED..

Syria is next, scheduled for the Fall TV season.
And what are Turkey or the Saudis going to do about it?

What did you think "if you're not with us, you're against us" meant?

>The perfection of their papers, and the necessity of the U.S. to deal
>with former Iraqi bureaucrats, means that many of the Iraqis the U.S.
>works with can very easily also be part of the underground, the
>resistance. Expect lots of double and even triple agents. A lot of
>Iraqis may seek to cover their bets by working both sides, just so they

>can later produce documents (encrypted, one assumes) proving their
>longstanding alliance to whichever side is dominant ten years from now.

The US will anticipate this.  That is why it publicly insists that the
current
government will go down hard ---to dissuade an underground.
It will use willing native Iraqis as underground-detectors.  It will
(continue to) monitor every phone call.  An underground will not be as
well
funded, redundant, or operationally secure as Hussein's government.
Not when most folks have jobs again and feel safer than they did
under Hussein.

>So, as many analysts have said, the military victory of our Abrams
>tanks over their obsolete tanks was the easy part. A harder part will
>be the police force action of the next several months, and dealing with

>the American public's frustration with mounting costs, longer
>deployments of troops, and periodic bombings and snipings.

As long as the bombings are on foreign soil, blasting military people,
the US can stomache it for a while.  Just get FOX to re-run the
statue-tipping, stories of torture, or some other US agitprop.

Unscheduled, domestic, schoolyard-demolition jobs are another matter.
But much harder operationally.


>And then the really hard part takes over. A year from now, two years
>from now, and Baghdad resembles Beirut or Nablus, and 100,000 troops
>are still patrolling the streets.

Beirut and Nablus are in resource-poor countries.  They won't be able
to affort the dishes that bring them MTV (a subtle form of psyops).

>And there is no boom in building semiconductor and television
>factories, as the optimists are expecting. And most of the nation is
>getting handouts from their new government, the U.S. puppet.

I'd expect "humanitarian aid" handouts for a while, but they will get
the oil flowing ASAP, which will provide jobs.  Young guys with
jobs don't blow themselves up as readily.

>Yep, grounds for optimism. The poverty of the West Bank, except a
>factor of ten larger.

The west bank has nothing.  Iraq has oil.  That wealth can be used
to pacify.

..........
Rome was not burnt in a day.   --James A. Donald