[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

[Billthedrill]

Why do we need to occupy Iraq?

We don't, in and of itself. But we're trying to force a change of government here and I seriously doubt that we're going to be able to accomplish this against a prepared enemy by dropping bombs, however smart. My point was that placing an army in a remote location and waiting for Saddam to come out and play is extremely unlikely to admit of success, especially inasmuch as Saddam remembers (unlike a whole bunch of people who are insisting that Bush is "avenging" his daddy) what happened last time he embarked in a standup fight.

I hate to sound like a hidebound fuddy-duddy here but we've heard this song before, before WWII, that a cleverly constructed bombing campaign could break a government in the absence of a ground committment. That sort of "thinking outside the box" was creative, innovative...and wrong.