Predicting Insurgency

I am getting tired of the anti-war side deriding the pro-war side for failing to see the scale of the Iraqi resistance that would follow the war.

Prior to the war, I did not address the issue for the simple reason that I thought that since the Sunni 20% of the population could police the other hostile 80% under Saddam's rule, 80% could certainly police the 20% dethroned. And when the Special Republican Guards collapsed rather than turn Baghdad into Stalingrad-on-the-Tigris as many war opponents warned (and which I stated was unlikely), I had some hope that the 20% did not have the will to fight on.

So the resistance was not entirely unforeseen. I just assumed it could be dealt with as a lesser problem than defeating Saddam in the first place (or deciding to overthrow Saddam to step back a bit). But what was shocking to me was the effectiveness of the Baathists. Large sums of money, weapons, and explosives allowed the Baathists to fuel the fight beyond what their numbers would indicate they were capable of fighting. Foreign jihadis aided them as well in ramping up violence (though it carried the seeds of their own defeat by alienating the majority).

But what angers me is the assumption that the anti-war side predicted this insurgency, and if only we'd listened to them we'd have avoided the problem. I remember quite a different discussion prior to the war. I remember anti-war types claiming the Bush administration only wanted war against Iraq rather than Iran or North Korea in order to gain an easy win over an easy target in order to gain political advantage in future elections.

So spare me claims of amazing predictive powers. Shoot, these same people thought the best answer to Saddam's WMD was to deter his use of them as we deterred the Soviet Union rather than invade.

The predictive power of the anti-war side is nothing they should be boasting about.