Having an Obligation to Obey the Law

A hard week in a long Iraq mission
Increasingly, US military experts say Americans need to prepare for a
decades-long counterinsurgency campaign. By Dan Murphy
http://www.csmonitor.com/2004/1224/p01s03-woiq.html?s=hns
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What the Nazis did not get and the neocons are not getting now is that most people obey the law because they feel that they have an obligation to do so -- not through fear of punishment. The essential point is made again and again in my field of philosophy of law. In his classic study, The Concept of Law, noted British legal theorist, H.L.A Hart made this point by distinguishing between what he called "having an obligation to obey" the rules of law versus "being obliged" (i.e. coerced) to do so:

http://www.angelfire.com/md2/timewarp/hart.html

For whatever reason most of us in a law abiding society obey most of its rules (we may speed on the parkways, but we don't murder, steal, whatever). When the rule of law is undermined or a society feels that rules are being imposed from without -- watch out! This is precisely what undid the Nazis with the resistance during WW2 and it is what will undo the U.S. occupation of Iraq. There is no way we can pacify Iraq's three conflicting religious/ethnic communities, as much a threat to each other as we are to them.