MEETING THE CHALLENGE: HappyFunPundit is proving that warbloggers are better than anti-warbloggers even when it comes to thinking up arguments against the war. Read this post:

Saddam isn’t planning on fighting a conventional war against the United States. He tried that the last time, and the “Mother of all Battles” turned out to be the mother of all embarassing routs. Saddam is nuts, but he’s not stupid. He won’t make that mistake again.

So what’s he going to do? The above quote is telling. My personal belief is that he is going to fight a war of world opinion. He’s learned lessons watching Arafat fight a much larger opponent. He’ll sacrifice his cannon-fodder troops who are not loyal enough to be allowed to crowd into the cities with him anyway, and when they are gone (surrendering quickly, my guess), he’ll pull his remaining army of maybe 100,000 loyalists into his heavily fortified and stockpiled cities, and force the U.S. to dig them out one building at a time. In the meantime, he’ll pull an Arafat, appearing on TV regularly surveying destroyed buildings, with plenty of bodies of children scattered around for effect. He’ll play the martyr card, big time.

Think about the difficulty Israel is having with world opinion just trying to remove a few terrorists from the West Bank and Gaza. Now imagine if the Palestinians had 100,000 soldiers, the resources to reinforce buildings, set up machine gun nests and tank traps, and build warrens of interlocking tunnels under the city. That’s what the U.S. will face in Baghdad, assuming it doesn’t collapse from within. Throw biological and chemical weapons into the mix, and you have a potential disaster.

The danger for Saddam (and the Iraqis) is that the likes of Chris Patten have caused the United States not to care nearly as much about world opinion as it used to. It’s also doubtful that Saddam can actually find 50,000 people who will stay loyal to him once the war is actually under way.

But this is a lot better than playground references.

UPDATE: Jim Henley has more.