Report Saddam Not Worried About U.S. Ground Invasion

There was an interesting piece in Sunday's NY Times, part of a series by Michael Gordon and Bernard Trainor, that paints a picture of a pre-war Saddam more worried about a Shia uprising than a ground invasion by American troops. Units of the Iraq Army were left disconnected and underprepared to fight the Americans lest they become effective arms of a Shiite rising, similar to the one that occurred following the 1991 Gulf War. Hussein was apparently convinced by the reluctance of the senior Pres. Bush and his advisors to go into Baghdad, believing that no American President would dare try it.

Of special interest is their assertion that:

The Iraqi dictator was so secretive and kept information so compartmentalized that his top military leaders were stunned when he told them three months before the war that he had no weapons of mass destruction, and they were demoralized because they had counted on hidden stocks of poison gas or germ weapons for the nation's defense.

It appears clear that, with the possible exception of Saddam and his two sons, everyone in the world, both inside and outside Iraq believed there were caches of WMD in Iraq. Not that this will in any way sway the "Bush Lied" crowd. But it should.