TURNED TAIL, DIDN'T HAVE TO RUN:

Saddam believes he can win even when staring defeat in the face (Andrew Cockburn, March 22, 2003, Times of London)

IN QUIETER times, Saddam Hussein starts the day with a digest of the foreign press. Right now, he may be too busy to read international speculation about his possible demise in the raid on Wednesday night, but he would certainly regard any suggestion that he is finished with derision.

The former hitman from Tikrit has never shown any sign of caving under pressure, still less turning tail, and there is no reason to believe that he will change now.

"He's keeping his nerve," one Iraqi opposition activist said disappointedly after watching Saddam's post-raid television broadcast. "He did not ask for this fight, in fact he made every concession he could to avoid it. But now it has been forced on him, he will fight to the end."

Well, except for the plane he had on the tarmac in 1991 so that he could flee if we headed for Baghdad. Sadly, the lesson that Saddam and Osama learned from the first Iraq War is that we in the West weren't serious about waging war on terror. We and the Iraqi people are paying a high price for that today. Posted by Orrin Judd at March 23, 2003 7:56 AM