Stardate 20020215.1425

(Captain's log): This is the last part of my analysis of the war in Iraq.

Part I: Iranian intervention
Part II: The problem of air supremacy and general Iraqi tactics
Part III: Axis of attack
Part IV: Development of the battlefield
Part V: Why not like in Afghanistan?

As will have certainly been noticed, I am hypothesizing that the war will be fought along relatively conventional approaches. Why not do it like in Afghanistan, with infiltration of special forces and the use of a local proxy force?

Tactics have to be tailored to the situation. What works in one theater may be a disaster in another. I don't think that it is possible to raise and arm a local insurgency in Iraq which is capable of winning.

One reason that was possible in Afghanistan is that it played to the standard Afghan way of waging war. In Afghanistan, there is usually a relatively small amount of actual fighting. It's much more like chess, with a lot of maneuver, a certain amount of demonstration, and a hell of a lot of backroom finagling to convince people to switch sides. The US was able to move special forces into Afghanistan and make contact with a lot of warlords all over the country and convince them that the US was going to win (which became a self-fulfilling prophecy, of course) so if they wanted to be on the winning side they better be ready to come over. That's how the Afghans do it, and ultimately a substantial part of the Taliban army simply deserted and a lot of areas they considered pacified rose in revolt. That was because the Taliban hold on things was actually very frail.

Such is not the case in Iraq. Saddam has held an iron grip on the country for more than twenty years, and has been ruthlessly stamping out any force which could conceivably rise against him during that entire time. The Iraqi army, especially the Republican Guard, is not organized along clan lines as is the case in Afghanistan, and while it might be expected at some point to collapse (as will any army when things go sufficiently badly) it will not defect and change sides.

There are really only two potential groups of allies which might be used as proxies. First, there are the marsh Arabs from the south; and there are also the Kurds. But we've already fucked both of them over, and they are unlikely to trust us.

In the aftermath of the Gulf War, there was a period where the US tried arming both groups to inspire them to revolt against Hussein, but once things got going the US got cold feet and cut them off, after which they both got butchered by reprisals.

The Kurds represent another problem, because the thought of providing them with substantial amounts of heavy armaments is enough to give the Turkish government hives. Whatever we give the Kurds in Iraq will start showing up in Turkey.

And only heavy weapons will do. Each of the Republican Guard divisions has more armor and artillery than existed in all of Afghanistan prior to our involvement there. Afghanistan was mainly a war of light infantry, where an experienced man with an AK-47 made a difference and a thousand of them were a substantial force.

A thousand men armed with AK-47's attacking a Republican Guard division will soon be a pile of corpses in the desert. To fight and win they need antitank guns and rockets and probably some armor of their own, and lots of trucks. They don't currently have any of this, and this is not something that can be changed in five weeks. Just getting enough in there to matter is non-trivial, and they'd have to be trained in their use.

In Afghanistan, the forces we needed for a proxy war were already in existence. In Iraq we'd have to recruit them. That's not the same.

There will be some of that. This war is going to be a complex mix of things, and special forces will definitely be involved. But unlike Afghanistan, they can't win this one on their own. This war, if it happens, will have to mainly be fought by the US Army.