"It can if your willing to grease the palms!"
[insert hindsight 20/20 cliche here]
Really my bigger point was that I don't believe it would have mattered in the least if we came from the north south east and west and even dug up from below with little folding shovels. The resistance would have happened regardless, hell I saw it coming and I'm nobody. The bigger problem of control was in an underestimation of troop numbers.
You seem so entrenched in your "I told you so" mode that you continually miss the point.
If the 4th ID had entered from the north, with as many troops has the 3rd ID had coming from the south, there would have been more troops, wouldn't there? Am I missing something or is it just you? Looks to me as if we would have had twice as many. There was simply not enough staging area in Kuwait for all those troops. We needed Turkey and they had already approved it or we wouldn't have gone there. Then with a new Parliament they tried to overplay their hand for the big bucks. We stayed there for weeks while Powell haggled with them. By the time we saw we weren't going to be able to offload and stage there, we were in Bahgdad and the war was basically over.
Had the 4th come from the north that area of the Ba'athist triangle which caused so much trouble would have been quickly subdued and any outsiders would have had no place to gather and coordinate. We would have had twice as many troops in Iraq and the problems would have been solved much sooner.
All of us have correctly said"I told you so" on something or other but most of us have learned it is unseemly to keep patting ourselves on the back, especially when we are wrong!!