RADICALITY:

Regime Thought War Unlikely, Iraqis Tell U.S. (THOM SHANKER, 2/12/04, NY Times)

A complacent Saddam Hussein was so convinced that war would be averted or that America would mount only a limited bombing campaign that he deployed the Iraqi military to crush domestic uprisings rather than defend against a ground invasion, according to a classified log of interrogations of captured Iraqi leaders and former officers.

Mr. Hussein believed that a "casualty averse" White House would order a bombing campaign that Iraq could withstand, according to the secret report, prepared for the Pentagon's most senior leadership and dated Jan. 26. And the Iraqi Defense Ministry, in a grand miscalculation, believed that any ground offensive would come across the Jordanian border.

The study, a rough-draft history of the war from the perspective of Iraqi leaders, offers a scathing history of a Stalinist, paranoid leadership circle in Baghdad that guaranteed its own destruction. The interrogations yielded a portrait of a government disconnected from reality in peace and in war, where members of Mr. Hussein's inner circle routinely lied to him and each other about Iraqi military capacities. [...]

The leadership in Baghdad believed the United States would mount a long-distance air war, mostly focused in the south because Turkey, north of Iraq, had denied access rights. A bombing campaign could "be absorbed," leaving the government in control, Iraqi officials said during their interrogations.

The interrogations were viewed by military officers who received the briefing as validating both the decision to send ground forces from the south to drive swiftly toward Baghdad — what Gen. Tommy R. Franks, the wartime commander, described as a strategy of "speed kills" — and the decision to use small numbers of Special Operations forces in western Iraq instead of large infantry forces in that section of the nation.

The speedy invasion by Army and Marine ground forces, entering from Kuwait, shocked the Iraqi leadership and its military, and brought the swift capture of Baghdad in three weeks with the loss of only 115 American lives to hostile fire.

Despite the broad news media coverage of the American and British buildup in Kuwait, the Iraqi Defense Ministry insisted that Jordan would be the launching pad for the invasion, according to the detainees.

That assessment was a wild misinterpretation of a series of Special Operations raids by relatively small numbers of the elite troops in the western desert, which began before the major land force crossed out of Kuwait.

The goal of the Special Operations missions was to destroy border posts and blind the Iraqi military in those zones as American and allied commandos hunted for unconventional weapons and missiles and controlled that vast, desolate terrain.

Pentagon officials said that the politically charged question of whether Iraq possessed unconventional weapons just before the invasion came up during the many closed-door discussions about the study, but that the report carried a disclaimer that that question was not under review in the study.

Glancing around the Web and twisting the radio knob you'll see and hear folks saying that this shows how badly Saddam misjudged us. In fact, his judgment was entirely sound as regards nearly everyone in the West, except for George W. Bush. No wonder though that the President's radical departure from our previous pusillanimity is paying such dividends from Libya to Pakistan.

Posted by Orrin Judd at February 12, 2004 05:27 PM