[MHGinTN]

Saddam is only a casual soldier, not a tactician. I don't care what fantasies casue him to run the Iraqi forces the sad way he does. We just need to kill enough of them so that we can disarm the survivors. MHG's 1st Axiom of War: Crush the enemy, then disarm the survivors. There is no #2.

[Destro]

Saddam doesn't delegate?

[Wavyhill]

I hate to use science fiction books as references about something as serious as war, but Saddam reminds me of Jerry Pournelle and S.M. Stirling's Go Tell the Spartans. In the story, the bad guys are retreating before the good guys so fast that the G.G.'s get suspicious. Something fishy is up. Sure enough, the B.G.'s turn out to have chemical weapons and use them. The thing is, though, and this is basically the "moral" of the story: although the B.G.'s have a Surprise Secret Weapon, they do not have the training to deal with adverse circumstances. The G.G.'s, who are better trained, regroup and proceed to kick the crap out of the B.G.'s, who have played their trump card. The hero points out to one of his men that this is proof of the old axiom, "No battle plan ever survives contact with the enemy." The B.G.'s, he points out, had undoubtedly heard that saying, but had probably interpreted it to mean that battle plans get slightly warped in battle. The hero points out that the saying is really saying that no battle plan ever survives contact with the enemy, and that victories are won not by Brilliant Strategies but by thorough training. It was a very good point, and I think that Saddam is a lot like the B.G.'s here. He thinks he's come up with a Brilliant Plan to defeat us; but he doesn't realize that we have the training to be prepared for it, whereas his troops do not have the training to seriously take advantage of it.