How to Invade a Country

by canram

1. First things first: You cannot invade a country that possesses WMD. A million bucks worth of chemicals can defeat a trillion-dollar army.
2. So you first go to the UN and allege that target country has WMD & is using them against its own people. That’s a humanitarian issue. The UN has to get involved.
3. You’ll have to bring some evidence. Something the whole world can see for themselves. Widespread media reports of babies dying work well.
4. The UN will then threaten to take action against target country unless they disarm WMD & allow inspections. The UN will reassure them: “Your internal matters are your own business. As long as you don’t have WMD, we will leave you to handle your internal issues as you see fit. Use all the ‘conventional’ methods you’d like; we won’t get involved. Pinky swear!
5. Target country will disarm & will allow UN inspectors to verify that they have disarmed. This takes a year or two.
6. In the meantime, you’ll want to push for some no-fly zones. Tell the UN, Hey, UN, target leader is losing control. He’s so paranoid that he’s actually bombing his own cities, based on rumors that rebels might be there. Civilians are dying! We need no-fly zones to save these people, and to give the democracy-loving rebels a chance.
7. The UN will institute and enforce no-fly zones.
8. You can now start building an army of locals under cover of those no-fly zones. Arm them. Train them. But don’t invest too much, you’ll probably have to kill most of these people later.
9. By this time, the UN should be pretty confident that all of target leader’s WMD have been destroyed. He did, after all, give the inspectors carte blanche, as agreed. They’ve combed every inch of target country. It’s clean. You are now free to invade without having to worry about WMD.
10. …but wait! What’s that you say? A defector says there are secret stockpiles? And there are plans to use them to wipe out all of those freedom-loving rebels? We can’t allow that!
11. INVADE.

2003, Iraq: Worked.

2011, Libya: Worked.

2018, Syria: ????