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Originally Posted by muspell
You could of course work around that and call the operation a continuation of the '91 war, because of the resolutions that most likely still were not fullfilled. But that argument will often have to pull in events prior to the Gulf-war, or events in the aftermath of Desert Storm in order to be justified. Other than that it would need to assume that there would still be stockpiles of wmds somewhere, asserted from for instance production potentials.
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iraq violated the conditions of the ceasefire by attacking planes patrolling the noflyzone and ejecting the inspectors. no need to assume anything.
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Originally Posted by muspell
Yet one of the differences between the Iraq war and the second world war was that the fighting stopped afterwards. There were a victor and there were a sense of defeat on the other end. In Iraq there seems to have been too many strange alliances and intents to create this kind of atmosphere, and in addition the US was not immediately there to dictate how things should be. Instead they seemed to believe in that they would be "greeted as liberators" and so on, and apparently refused to see what was needed.
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while there was resistance in occupied japan and germany, it was not as serious as in iraq. i am convinced, that the reason is, that the germans and the japanese people were broken and starving and desperately wanted peace. the war in iraq did not put enough strain on civillians and the combat was over too quickly, if the coalition had done strategic bombing of the cities and killed a few hundred thousands or millions and the people in iraq had been starving and then the coalition had come, it would have cost a lot less coalition lifes, as the people would be desperate for peace. caesar describes in his "de bello gallico" very well, how the gaulic tribes continued to give him trouble again and again. permanent pacification would only be achieved by facing off the enemy in a decimating battle, that would kill an enormous number of them. like in his very first campaign against the helvetii, caesar tried diplomacy, threats, small engagements, but nothing worked until in the final battle he had his troops kill a qurter million of them -men women and children- that is about 2/3rd of the tribe dead, after that the helvetii peacefully returned to their homes and never gave rome trouble again. to equate this with iraq, it would mean of the 22million iraqis, the coalition would have had to have killed 15million people, then the remainder would surely be extremely peaceful. now, for effect maybe only a few million or even only half a million would have been enough to break the enemys fightingspirit, but the members of the coalition are just too soft to go through with something like this and they chose not to do it.