However, this afternoon I was at a Muslim butcher shop run by an Iraqi who turned out to be a former Iraqi Gulf War POW. He told me that the bulk of the Iraqi Army is made up of conscripts who are sent to front under threat of death or prison-- for them and their families. He said the reason why so many surrendered so willingly in the first Gulf War (apart from being thoroughly outclassed), was that no one wanted to die for Saddam Hussein.
He thinks that if there is targeted action against the Iraqi leadership and the senior officer corps, rank and file soldiers and lower level officers up to the level of captain would stand by and cheer.
One caveat... he felt that America stood by while Saddam crushed the Shiite/Kurd rebellion in 1991. He says, the rebels don't trust America, and they don't trust any of the London-based dissident groups. Given that some of his relatives were killed by Saddam in the rebellion, he and others like him want to know for sure that they won't be screwed again.
While the effort to connect Saddam to Osama is certainly suspect, and I don't like the idea of starting a war against a nation that has not attacked us-- I now believe that the doomsayers are wrong. All we have to do is take out his already degraded chem-bio capability early on. Once that's done, there's little that the small coterie of Saddam loyalists are going to be able to do.
Like the guy said " even Saddam's sons will not die for Saddam".