Reminder of historical parallels

I linked to this NEWSWEEK article earlier and it's worth a read. But reading through it, I came across a little reminder of a previous post:

The White House wanted to believe that it could get away with a relatively quick in-and-out operation because American soldiers, Vice President Cheney predicted, “will, in fact, be greeted as liberators.” The bad guys—the worst of Saddam’s Baathist Party—would flee or surrender, but a large middle-class “Mesopotamian bureaucracy” would remain in place to run the country. This notion was pushed by a band of Iraqi exiles, most notably Ahmad Chalabi, who have close ties to the Pentagon neocons—and who stood ready to step in and fill the leadership void. Within a few months, it was hoped, American forces could be drawn down to no more than 50,000 troops.[Emphasis added]

Don't forget, I started my diatribe comparing the Bush administration to the radicalization in Revolutionary France with this quotation from Alan Forrest's Soldiers of the French Revolution:

By 1792, this view [that war was necessary to maintain the Revolution] was most clearly identified in the Girondins, the group in the Assembly that most consistently advocated war against Austria if the Revolution were to be saved. While Robespierre and his supporters among the Paris Jacobins warned that war would only distract the French people from their real enemies within, Roland, Brissot, and other leading Girondin politicians insisted that there was no necessary contradiction between internal surveillance and external conflict. Brissot even went so far as to claim that he did not see a war policy as being in any sense dangerous because French troops would be welcomed in countries they invaded as liberators and missionaries of liberty. [emphasis added]

Didn't quite pan out in either case did it?

The thing is, it's not the case that Armies who invade countries governed by tyrranical despots are never greeted as liberators. Even Hitler's armies were greeted as liberators when they invaded outlying Soviet states, until the populace realized that living under Nazi Germany wasn't much of an improvement. But from a strategic standpoint, being greeted as liberators by an invaded populace should never be depended on. The difference between what happened with Revolutionary and then Napoleonic France is that their strategy didn't depend on their soldiers being loved by the general populace. It seems that Bush's entire post-war plan was based on this premise.