ONE WILD & CRAZY GUY

Behind Baghdad's fall : Hussein son's wild orders led to Iraq military collapse (Robert Collier, May 25, 2003, San Francisco Chronicle)

In the final days before Baghdad fell, Saddam Hussein's son Qusai issued a series of military orders that sent thousands of elite Republican Guard troops to their certain death in the open countryside.

According to accounts provided to The Chronicle by more than a dozen Iraqi military officials -- some of them still hiding from American forces -- the orders exposed the core of the Iraqi military to devastating U.S. air attacks and left the capital's defenses markedly weakened. [...]

The Iraqi leaders failed to follow through on prewar plans to mount a comprehensive urban guerrilla defense for Baghdad.

Despite Iraqis' frequent pronouncements before the war that they would fall back into Baghdad and fight house to house, they did nothing of the sort. Instead, they stuck to a largely conventional defense comprised of three concentric rings, extending as far as 30 miles outside of Baghdad.

Gen. Alaa Abdelkadeer, a Republican Guard commander in Baghdad, said that prewar plans had also included such tactics as mining streets and bridges. "There was even a plan to mine the airport, to blow it sky high if the Americans took it," he said. "But none of this was carried out."

When asked why, he shrugged. "Because we thought Baghdad was very safe. We never thought the Americans would be able to enter the city."

An officer in the Mukhabarat, the Iraqi secret police, who asked to remain anonymous, said: "(Baghdad) was like a castle. The Americans could never come close -- we were sure of it."

This comports with the idea that Saddam was killed or incapacitated on the first night of the war. Posted by Orrin Judd at May 25, 2003 8:22 AM