I'd suggest that there is more agreement between Old Marine 1 and Old Marine 2 than Old Marine 2 seems to think:

from Van Riper
If you have a war that doesn't come to a very definitive conclusion, there are people who don't believe they've been defeated. One thing that we saw in this war, there was no surrender. There was no point in time where someone in authority said, "The government of Iraq surrenders to the Coalition forces."
....
There were sufficient forces to capture Baghdad. But what we call follow-up forces—exploitation forces and reserves—were not available. Imagine on the day that we seized Baghdad, if we had follow-up armed forces, exploitation forces, continue up into what we now know as the Sunni Triangle, go into Tikrit, instead of having that long lag time. If there had been a lot of so-called boots on the ground at the beginning, you might have convinced a lot of people that the war was over at that time.
from KW
As an aside, I disagree with Paul Van Riper and would suggest that in the case of Iraq, the contributing factor to the initiation of the insurgency was not the absence of a formal surrender but rather the fact that the Iraqis did not believe they had been defeated -- not the same thing at all
Grumpy Old Men without Ann-Margaret ?

The only reason I am getting into this is the I Law question of who gives a surrender when the recognized government has MIRVed in all directions, including spider holes. Have to look at Max Soreson's Manual and see if there is an answer.

The rest of this discussion (alternative military history) is outside my usual territory; except for the following learned maxim:

what coulda, shoulda happened = NOT necessarily = what woulda happened.

credit: White's Encyclopedia.