Jason Y writes:
That’s a good point. A well armed population is hell for invaders. Imagine, if the Germans or Japanese did invade. Man, that would be hell. I mean, look at what the Germans did to Russia, or Japan to Korea and China.
Under Saddam Hussein, all households had an AK-47. These men were all more or less part of local militias under the command of the Iraqi state that were supposed to defend the country. They trained sometimes on weekends. This is fairly common and a lot of countries have this. When the Americans invaded this last time during The War on the Iraqi People, Saddam the patriot told all patriotic Iraqis to grab their guns from their homes and form local militias to fight off the invaders. Actually quite a few of them did just that, even in the Shia areas. But you can see how well that worked. We steamrolled all the way Baghdad and I believe we had the whole country wrapped by in 3 weeks.
Even an AK-47 by your doorstep in no match for the US military. And all internal rebellions against Saddam were quickly crushed.
