The "W" in Napoleon is silent.

Margaret Atwood in today's LA Times points out some lessons from an earlier ruler who believed he would remake the world.

Napoleon's big mistake was underestimating the religious feelings of the staunchly Roman Catholic Spanish. He thought they'd embrace "liberation," but it seems they had a curious attachment to their own beliefs. The British annoyed Napoleon in Spain by winning battles against him, but the real defeat of the French was brought about by widespread guerrilla resistance.

Things got very nasty on both sides: The Spaniards cut French throats, the French roasted Spaniards alive, the Spaniards sawed a French general in two. The Spanish population won -- although at enormous cost -- because you can kill some of the people all of the time and you can kill all of the people some of the time but you can't kill all of the people all of the time. When a whole population hates you, and hates you fanatically, it's difficult to rule.

Present leaders, take note: Never underestimate the power of religious fervor. Also: Your version of what's good for them may not match theirs.

[...]

The occupation of Japan after the Second World War has been proposed as a model for Iraq. It's not a helpful comparison.

First, the religious fervor of the Japanese soldier was attached to the emperor, who thus had the power to order a surrender. Iraq will have no such single authority. Second, Japan is an island: No Russian-style, Afghan-style retreat was possible. Third, the Japanese had no neighbors who shared their religious views and might aid them. They had only two choices: death or democracy.

Iraq on the other hand has many coreligionist neighbors who will sympathize with it, however repugnant they've previously found Hussein. A foreign occupation -- not immediately, but in the long run -- is less likely to resemble MacArthur in Japan than Napoleon in Spain.

To date, all of Bush's foreign policy has been conducted like a bull in a china shop, and now we're about to step into a terribly complicated situation among the Shi'a, the Ba'athist Sunni, the non-Ba'athist Sunni, returning ex-pats, the Kurds, the Turks, the Iranians, and possibly the Israelis, who say they'll retaliate this time if they are shelled.

Terribly complicated situations do not lend themselves well to the sort of binary lens through which GWB seems to view the world. And may I say as an aside that the next time I hear somebody wax orgasmic about Bush's "moral clarity," I will stab them in the neck scream. You are not blessed with clarity just because your moral crayon box only has two colors in it. Sorry, but that phrase drives me batty.

Anyhow, the problem is that, unlike Japan or Germany, Iraq is not an organic nation-state. Iraq is an artificial political entity created by the British in 1920 from pieces of the collapsed Ottoman empire. It's Yugoslavia without the skiing, and the initial post-Saddam era promises to be filled with bloody retribution. And the United States Army will be standing in the middle of it, responsible for policing and running courts and everything else.

And there's the next-step argument that the Bush clique will not address. We all agree that Saddam is a very bad man and that most Iraqis, indeed most humans, would rather he weren't there. But how long will the American public tolerate our military being caught in the middle of a brutal civil war with multiple fronts and several sides? You and I both know the answer: not long at all.

This has bad idea written all over it. Unimaginably expensive bad idea, at that. And when all hell breaks loose, the Republicans will blame it on Clinton's genitals.