There was plenty of discussion of this before and in the early
stages of this war, that Saddam had planned and prepared for a
guerilla conflict, that he had read Gen Giap. That doesn't mean
that he IS Gen. Giap. but fuck, I predicted a quick transition to
a guerilla conflict:
bemildred (5853 posts) Mar-18-03, 01:44 PM (ET)
Mar-18-03, 01:44 PM (ET)
Iraqi war strategy.
Seems like a no-brainer to me. Wondered what wiser heads
down here in the dungeon might think.
1.) Standup conventional fight is a loser, so this will be
avoided, if possible. Maybe a test of two to see how bad
it is.
2.) Disperse and conserve forces, use deceptive methods to
attract attack away from hard assets. Wait/hope for most
of the scarce/expensive hi-tech stuff to get used up.
3.) Set lots of traps. Do anything else that causes delay,
buy all the time you can.
4.) Play for follow-on non-conventional fight. Let Baghdad
and other "loyal" cities be "taken" with relative ease, and
then start your counter-attack in hopes of inflicting high
damage on the occupiers.
Regards.
Here's another take from a not particularly liberal slant:
WASHINGTON - There are still a thousand reasons why Iraq is NOT Vietnam, but after a year of bitter combat in that place the points of similarity and intersection are growing both in number and intensity, and that's not good news.
My thoughts lately have turned to the words of two wily old warrior-strategists, Gen. Vo Nguyen Giap of Vietnam and the Prussian Carl von Clausewitz.
In an early and eerily prescient analysis of the future course of the Viet Minh guerrilla war against the French colonial occupiers, Giap wrote: "The enemy will pass slowly from the offensive to the defensive. The blitzkrieg will transform itself into a war of long duration. Thus, the enemy will be caught in a dilemma: He has to drag out the war in order to win it and does not possess, on the other hand, the psychological and political means to fight a long-drawn-out war."
Giap was right about the French, and the same principle and the same outcome would apply to the American armies that replaced the French armies.
Military.Com