Lance wrote:Again, the difference is that we were fighting the governments, now we are fighting their whole <some other word besides ideology since that didn't work last time>.
So who decided that the battle would be against the German government, and the government only, in the 1940s, but against something much more intangible in Iraq sixty years later? The Iraqi invasion began on March 19th. On May 1st, forty-three days later, the president of the US gave a speech on an aircraft carrier in front of a huge banner that read "Mission Accomplished". It sounds to me like he thought the battle was against the Iraqi government, until the insurgents informed him that they were going to improvise instead of following the script.
In Germany, lots of people adhered to an ideology that now has a rather bad reputation. If you're a filmmaker and you want everyone to know who the bad guy is, all you have to do is slap a swastika on his shoulder. The Germans
could have continued fighting, but they didn't. If the Germans had fought a guerrilla campaign from 1945 until 1970 against the occupying powers, killing maybe a few hundred thousand of them, we wouldn't be saying that the war against Germany was a war only against the German government. We'd be saying it was a war against the German people, or against an ideology, or against something other than the government, as the government fell in 1945. But we're not saying that, because there wasn't an insurgency in Germany after the government fell.
The people in Iraq could have put down their weapons, and said, "we may not like this situation, but it's what happened, let's live with it the best we can, and try to build a better future". In that case, we'd be sitting here saying that the Iraq war was against the government of Iraq, and ended when the government fell. As nearly as I can tell, that's the scenario Mr. "Mission Accomplished" seemed to have in mind. However, we're not saying that, because the Iraqi insurgents went off-script. I think the coalition that invaded Iraq would have been quite happy to fight just the government, but the Iraqi insurgents had a different idea.
The German people could launched an insurgency, but they didn't. The Iraqi people didn't have to launch an insurgency, but they did. In each case, the nature of the battle was determined by the behaviour of the people in the countries that were occupied. They behaved one way in one case, and a different way in the other case. Had they behaved differently, the nature of the conflicts would have been completely different. So why did they behave one way in the one case, and a different way in the other case?