JOHN KEEGAN WRITES THAT IT HASN’T BEEN A REAL WAR IN BAGHDAD:

In orthodox military practice, the Republican Guard, less perhaps a portion held back for last-ditch defence, should have been committed first, to blunt the coalition onset. The regular army should then have been committed to reinforce the Republican Guard when and where it achieved success. The paramilitaries should have been kept out of battle, to harass the invaders if the regular defence collapsed.

Saddam has fought the battle the other way around. The regular army was committed first, south of Baghdad, and seems to have run away as soon as it saw that the fighting threatened to be serious. The Republican Guard was then brought forward to hold the approaches to Baghdad and has been devastated by American air attack, its armoured units in particular being offered up for pointless sacrifice.

The only serious resistance appears to have been offered by the units least capable of meeting the coalition troops on equal terms, the Ba’ath Party militia, effectively a sort of political Mafia equipped with nothing more effective than hand-held weapons.

Because the war has taken such a strange form, the media, particularly those at home, may be forgiven for their misinterpretation of how it has progressed. Checks have been described as defeats, minor firefights as major battles. In truth, there has been almost no check to the unimpeded onrush of the coalition, particularly the dramatic American advance to Baghdad; nor have there been any major battles. This has been a collapse, not a war.

Nevertheless, Air Marshal Brian Burridge, the British commander in the Gulf, has a point when he says the British media have lost the plot. . . .

The older media generation, particularly those covering the war from comfortable television studios, has not covered itself with glory. Deeply infected with anti-war feeling and Left-wing antipathy to the use of force as a means of doing good, it has once again sought to depict the achievements of the West’s servicemen as a subject for disapproval.

The brave young American and British servicemen – and women – who have risked their lives to bring down Saddam have every reason to feel that there is something corrupt about their home-based media.

Keegan never explains why Saddam’s strategy was so inept. I suspect, however, that he didn’t trust even the “elite” Republican Guard to operate out of his sight, for fear of defections. Thus he couldn’t employ it as Keegan suggests, and had to keep it close to Baghdad or other loci of control.

UPDATE: Reader Bryan Smith emails:

Personally, I think Saddam did have a plan, but not a military one. I don’t believe he had any intent of winning this war. He assumed a large portion of his regular army would desert. He kept the Republican Guard around Bagdad so he would have an effective police force once the Americans left. He didn’t use chemical weapons because that would have enraged us and set world opinion against him (world opinion being France and Germany, who could no longer support him). Basically, I think he played the 3rd-world victim and waited for Western weakness. The UN nonsense and the “anti-war” demonstrations must have given him some hope…

This plan, from our perspective, is of course as inept as his military one.

Hmm. Does this make the antiwar and UN folks partly responsible for all those Iraqi soldiers who died? I won’t make that charge, but others have. . . .

Meanwhile several readers thought Saddam’s military problems were explained by this Ralph Peters column on “The Secret War.” Could be.