The sight of them panicked Cassandras here in the United States who were quick to predict that the evidence of any armed resistance meant that we were in for a long guerrilla war. But the Vietnam analogy was absurd. It was not the people of southern Iraq who harassed our troops on the drive to Baghdad, but the regime's shock troops. These ``irregulars'' were not insurgents; they were counterinsurgents. They did not represent the people they used as human shields; they ruthlessly repressed them.
Most of these enforcers were Sunnis from northern tribes, alien to the Shiite population they ruled. In the secret police prison in Basra, seven of the 16 officers were surnamed Tikriti, i.e., they came from Tikrit, Saddam's hometown in Sunni north-central Iraq. They were not guerrillas, Mao's ``fish swimming in the sea of the people.'' They were aliens who survived by torturing the locals and, when the British liberators arrived, by shooting civilians in the back. Rooting out these Baath thugs in the middle of a war was difficult, but as soon as the local population became convinced that the regime was finished, they were finished too.
Ever since Vietnam, people have been justly skeptical of the claim of ``surgical strikes.'' There was nothing surgical about the Vietnam War. But the war in Iraq was radically different. Saddam was not waging a popular war; he was defending a regime that made war on its own people.
Not only was the enemy different, however. So was the technology, and the doctrine. We can speak today of a surgical war not only because technology yields weapons of astonishing precision, but because the coalition war strategy has had one supreme objective: the surgical destruction of a totalitarian regime. This had never been done before.
Which is what makes the Three Week War a revolution in world affairs. It is one thing to depose tin-pot dictators. Anyone can do that. It is another thing to destroy a Stalinist demigod and his elaborate apparatus of repression--and leave the country standing. From Damascus to Pyongyang, totalitarians everywhere are watching this war with shock and awe.