Yep. Caught with his pants down.
Posted on 03/13/2006 5:57:47 PM PST by blam
Baghdad bridges mystery solved
By Francis Harris in Washington
(Filed: 14/03/2006)
A classified American army report based on interviews with senior Iraqis has cleared up a mystery which has baffled western military experts since the invasion of March 2003.
As American units raced towards the capital, military observers had confidently expected Saddam to destroy all the major bridges into Baghdad to give Iraqi forces more time to prepare their defence of the capital. But he did not.
According to papers leaked to The New York Times, Saddam told his commanders that the Americans would not seek to capture Baghdad and instructed that the bridges be left intact so that his forces could head south to crush any revolt by anti-regime elements once the war was over.
A captured commander of Saddam's elite Republican Guard later told the Americans: "We thought the coalition would go to Basra... and then the war would end."
Saddam prepared for a re-run of the 1991 Gulf war when the end of hostilities was followed by a major Shia uprising.
Once it became clear that the Americans were heading for Baghdad, Saddam belatedly gave the order for bridges over the Euphrates to be blown but the explosive charges failed to bring the structures down and the Americans swept across.
The American report says the regime's paranoia hobbled Iraq's defence in other ways.
Determined to prevent an uprising by his own army, Saddam put loyalists in charge of the Republican Guard.
The best troops, those of the Special Republican Guard defending Baghdad, were handed to a notorious drunk and military incompetent, Brig Gen Barzan Majid al-Tikriti.
Meanwhile units south of the city facing the Americans had their radios taken away to prevent any conspiracy against Saddam. That left them unable to co-ordinate their defence.
Yep. Caught with his pants down.
Makes it sound like the Keystone Cops were running things.
Strange. Saddam would rather face US forces than his enemies from within.
.....and we have to deal with democrats.
They were able to fight Iran to a draw.
They may need to do it again.
Wrong Bush!
We could have just sent Saddam all our Democrats, and let his army immigrate into America, and then everyone would have been happy.
Wrong Bush
Unlike Bush in 1991, Bush in 2003 did not have to worry about major Russian reaction to his activities. I have always thought we should have run GWI for 24 to 36 more hours. However, we could not have done it much longer than that. Gorbachev was facing the hardliners in his government. You may remember the attempted coup. I believe we had to stop in Iraq to keep the hardliners from having an excuse to topple Gorbachev. What do you think?
Very plausible.
We stopped GW1 after pushing Iraq out of Kuwait because that was the mission under which the coalition of all the neighbors was formed. To do otherwise would have been a betrayal of that coalition.
GWI only had a mandate for ejecting Saddam from Kuwait. Going to Baghdad would have definitely split that coalition and there was a slight chance the Arab forces would have turned on US forces.
"We stopped GW1 after pushing Iraq out of Kuwait because that was the mission under which the coalition of all the neighbors was formed. To do otherwise would have been a betrayal of that coalition."
I agree until Saddam started butchering the Kurds, I saw their plight as a pox on our head.
If anybody could convince the Democrats about the good of the second amendment, it would be Saddam Hussein.
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