Why not Spain?

I notice TAPPED has linked to the Cleland article which I already posted on below.

TAPPED had this to say:

Historical analogies can be misleading. In many ways -- even many important ways -- Iraq is unlike Vietnam. But in other ways, the parallels are eerily similar, and worrisome.

See what annoys me about this is that if you replace "Iraq" and "Vietnam" (and maybe take out the word "worrisome") this would likely work. As in this:

Historical analogies can be misleading. In many ways -- even many important ways -- World War II is unlike the Peloponesian Wars. But in other ways, the parallels are eerily similar.

The thing is, I think Iraq will likely end up being a quagmire, but allusions to Vietnam are annoying because they ignore so many fundamental differences. Besides what I outlined below about the buildup, Vietnam was a more limited war. Our goal was to prevent the north from invading the south, and hence enforce the borders as drawn by the Geneva Accords of 1954. What we failed to take into account was how much support the north had in the South. Also we had the difficulty of being essentially unable to take the major value points in the North, Hanoi the capital and Haiphong the major port, since they were extraordinarily close to China, and doing so may have provoked the Chinese to counterattack as they did in Korea. All this changed Vietnam from a limited war into a prolonged, costly, painful mistake of a war.

But the thing is we won the war in Iraq, if you look at this in purely Imperial terms. We have military control of Iraq, all of Iraq's land, for practical purposes, belongs to the US.

Right now we're having a problem securing that land.

Which is why I find a better parallel to our situation in Iraq than Vietnam would be Napoleon and France's ill-conceived invasion of Spain.

I've already done a post comparing current Bush policies to Revolutionary France (and I've heard that in his latest book Paul Krugman makes a similar analogy. Go Raznor. Go Raznor) so why not compare our current war to the goings on in Imperial France?

Napoleon was undeniably a military genious. In previous European wars, the focus was on the acquisition of land, either taking a province from a neighboring nation, or defending a province from a neighboring nation. These wars were as clean as war could be. Very seldom did this result in the elimination of a foreign government, because at the time, most of these nations were kingdoms, so the respective kings would have a certain professional respect for competing kings, and were many times even related.

But Napoleon wasn't interested in simple land acquisition. He was interested in conquest. So, for instance, if he wanted Savoy, rather than the old way of securing a section of Savoy's land, and defend it from counterattack until he could grab a little more land, he would find where Savoy's military was, and actually attack Savoy's army, and once Savoy's army was in tatters, there'd be no one left to defend Savoy's land, and ipso facto, Savoy becomes the newest province of France.

But then we get to Spain. Napoleon was able to eliminate Spain's standing forces, if not easily, at least without much more difficulty than with any other army France conquered at the time. But then something happened. The peasantry of Spain rose up to fight the invading French army. What followed was a long and grueling guerilla war that eventually led to British forces landing in Spain to side with the Spanish peasantry to push France out of Spain. [for illustrations of this, take a look at Goya's paintings of a peasant uprising in Madrid and the subsequent French retaliation]

Here's the thing (to make this even more of an uncanny analogy to Iraq), the Spanish king the peasantry was fighting for was by no means a benign one. He was in fact a very brutal ruler, whose regime continued to carry out the Inquisition, and under whom peasants received only slightly more legal rights than a mule. But they fought the foreign occupiers anyway. Because I guess the local brutal ruler you know beats the foreign invaders who you don't. (I mean, if Zimbabwe suddenly took over America, I'd be all for running them out, even if it meant reinstalling Bush as ruler. And I'm not saying Bush is Ferdinand VII, so lay off) The trouble in Spain put a huge damper in Napoleon's quest for continental Empire, and combined with failed campaigns in Italy and Russia led to his downfall.

So is our situation in Iraq essentially the same as France's situation in Spain? No, of course not. Fundamentally, it seems that the resistance we're facing from the Iraqis is not nearly as strong as the resistance put up by the Spaniards. But our ability to quell such resistance isn't as strong as the ability possessed by the French.

Some opponents of Bush have called Bush's grab for Iraq naked Imperialism. But it's not. It's scantily clad Imperialism. It's under the rhetoric of us liberating Iraq, that we're there to help the Iraqi people. So the American people don't have the stomach nor desire to treat Iraq like any other Imperial holding. If we did, then the guerillas wouldn't be much of a problem. When the UN bombing occurred, we could round up maybe 50 Baghdad civilians, claim they were responsible, and publicly execute them. That would theoretically keep enough of the population scared to allow us to deal with those who weren't. But it would be very hard to reconcile that with the rhetoric surrounding the war. And with support of the war already waning, it would drop far too much when it became transparent that it wasn't about all those nice noble reasons the Administration keeps talking about.