Check out http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A48331-2003Mar29.html
If all the Iraqi farmers/civilians have half this guy's stash...
It's probably safer to invade Iraq than, say, Switzerland,
because the Iraqi government probably didn't trust all its
ethnic minorities with weapons, or at least not enough to buy them for everyone.
(And by the way, the pro-invasion side bashes the French for surrendering to the Germans, largely because they don't support the invasion, but they're not bashing the Swiss for not joining the COWboys, and they _are_ bashing the Iraqi civilians for acting Swiss, not French.)
That was one of the absurd things in the US-Somali war, where US military forces claimed they were going to disarm the Somalis. While many of the Somalis they were attacking had moved into cities, it's still a culture that have traditionally been nomadic cattle-herders, and telling them to give up their weapons was rather stupider than going to an NRA rally in Texas ranch country and telling _them_ that.
It's not like the Somalis had gone armadillo since the Siad-Barre dictatorship;
they'd just gradually adopted AK47s along with the traditional spears.
