[Billthedrill]

If he let the force remain unopposed, he'd lose control of his country.

Pardon me, but this is silly, IMHO. We put a force in place in the boonies and say "come attack me" and Saddam just says "so what?". You win wars by occupying ground and killing the enemy, and that hasn't changed in a few hundred thousand years, and that is what we're going to have to do.

[XJarhead]

If the Iraqi army, instead, elected not to fight and to remain in Baghdad, it would be isolated, impotent and in danger of starvation. Meanwhile the rest of the country would be liberated.

That might work. The problem is that the images of civilians in Baghdad starving to death or succumbing to disease due to a U.S. "siege" would be plastered all over the world. That might not be something that we could continue for an extended period, and the author hasn't addressed that possibility at all.

[Alas Babylon!]

I don't know about that. Siege warfare has been around a long time too. It is good strategy to isolate and cut off an enemy that cannot then attack you directly without losing that attack. I expect my generals to not waste their troop's lives with head-on clashes when, as Dubya said, "We will smoke them out of their holes and then kill them!"

Regardless of time-honored traditions, the American military does what's needed to win even if it's non-standard. Otherwise, the British would've won when we stood line-to-line with them. Hiding behind trees and rocks picking off the British (then the world's superpower) thin red line worked, despite the line-to-line tradition of that era's European warfare tactics.

[Steely Tom]

We put a force in place in the boonies and say "come attack me" and Saddam just says "so what?".

What if we put a force in place, and then put Exxon/Mobil in place, and then say "come stop us from taking your oil." Do you think Saddam will just say "so what?"

The possibilities are endless.

(steely)

[Mr. Bird]

You win wars by occupying ground and killing the enemy

But, if we've identified a proxy (new regime), we need not occupy that ground (the city) ourselves. We WOULD be occupying, effectively, the rest of the country. It's been months since I first read the Baghdad-isolation strategy, and I still think it's the way to go. We can choke them to death just by surrounding them. Saddam (and his sympathizers) like the idea of Somalia-like street warfare, but it's just not necessary.

[CyberSpartacus]

"The true art of war is starving your enemy."
Frederick the Great King of Prussia

[marron]

. We put a force in place in the boonies and say "come attack me" and Saddam just says "so what?".

Not quite. Basra is Shia territory, and should fall quickly, along with the southern oil fields.

The north is Kurdish, and is presently relatively independent. It shouldn't be difficult to occupy this ground, and push the line of control only a few miles south to include the northern oil fields.

A drive on Baghdad would only have to go far enough to seize the oil installations around Baghdad.

At that point, Saddam and Baghdad become irrelevant. They can come out to play, and face annihilation, or hunker down until they implode. The most likely scenario is that the Iraqi Army will enter Baghdad and take it from Saddam. In my mind's eye I envision something similar to Bucharest and the annihilation of Ceacescu's security apparatus by the Romanian army.

It will be ticklish, but I fully believe that entire units of the Iraqi army will switch sides, and they will be our occupation force.

[boris]

"Pardon me, but this is silly, IMHO. We put a force in place in the boonies and say "come attack me" and Saddam just says "so what?". You win wars by occupying ground and killing the enemy, and that hasn't changed in a few hundred thousand years, and that is what we're going to have to do."

Suppose, for the sake of argument, that we simply dropped a ten-megaton bomb on Baghdad and walked away. "NEXT!"

Why do we need to occupy Iraq?

The way to conquer territory is to stand on it and defend it against all comers. But we don't really need the territory (possibly the oil fields), we just want Saddam, his henchmen, and his entire government to go 'poof!'. Nothing like a nuke to do that once and for all.

--Boris

[Polybius]

If he let the force remain unopposed, he'd lose control of his country.

Pardon me, but this is silly, IMHO. We put a force in place in the boonies and say "come attack me" and Saddam just says "so what?". You win wars by occupying ground and killing the enemy, and that hasn't changed in a few hundred thousand years, and that is what we're going to have to do.

I believe that what the author means to say is that the Iraqi Army cannot just remain buried like cowering gophers to avoid being killed by U.S airpower without giving the U.S. armored columns complete freedom of movement to occupy all of Iraq without firing a shot.

The Iraqi choices would be:
A) Remain cowering underground while the U.S. occupies the country unopposed.
B) Come out into the open and die fighting.

Either way, the Iraqis lose.

Battles are not always won by killing the other guy. They can be won by making the other guy totally irrelevant which is what would happen if the Iraqis choose Choice A.

Take, for example, the "Battle of Rabaul" where 100,000 of Japan's finest troops were ready to inflict catastrophic losses on American invasion forces.

MacArthur solved the problem of Rabaul, AKA "The Impregnable Gibraltar of the Pacific", by simply isolating Rabaul and bypassing it. That left 100,000 crack Japanese troops on Rabaul as useless to the Japanese war effort as if they had been on the Moon.

The Japanese strong points at Madang was likewise "leap-frogged".

Those 100,000 Japanese on Rabaul never saw an American Marine. They spent 1942, 1943, 1944, 1945 and even 1946 and 1947 stuck on the Island of New Britain. They never got back back to Japan until the U.S. Government loaned Japan some money in 1947 to rescue them from their humiliation.

[hinckley buzzard]

The Communists never occupied any ground in South VietNam. It isn't necessary if you can deprive the enemy of the capacity to continue the fight.

The only thing I would add to this scenario is an emphasis on pinpointing and destroying the CBR facilities and ammunition depots, and that might well take numbers of Special Forces on the ground. Eliminating WMD's is still a top priority for this misssion.