WASHINGTON, April 13 (UPI) -- First of two parts
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Last Wednesday, we went out on a limb in UPI Analysis and concluded the evidence was overwhelming that Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein was already dead, his foul physical body obliterated last Monday by the four 2,000-pound bunker-busting bombs unloaded on him courtesy of the U.S. Air Force.
Since then, not a hair has been seen or a whisper heard of the Butcher of Baghdad. The Wicked Witch is indeed dead.
In addition to the many reasons we recorded then pointing to this conclusion, more data has flowed in.
First, from within 24 hours after the Monday air strike, the entire Baath totalitarian regime in Iraq was acting as if he were. U.S. Sigint, or Signals Intelligence, monitored from the middle of the week onwards a consistent pattern of conversation among lower levels of the Baath party and the Iraqi army -- as both were disintegrating -- that clearly took for granted the deaths of Saddam and his two sons Uday and Qusay.
Second, starting exactly the same time the very top surviving officials of the regime started acting exactly the same way.
Information Minister Mohammed Sayeed al-Sahhaf, who kept his composure and discipline even when U.S. Army Main Battle Tanks were in direct line of sight of his briefings in Baghdad's Palestine Hotel, suddenly vanished from sight and gave up the ghost of his previously punctilious appearances.
Tariq Aziz, Saddam's top political lieutenant through thick and thin, similarly vanished from sight and from the chain of command. And in the middle of the week, Iraq's ambassador to the United Nations glumly announced to the world that the game was up.
Third, as recently as Friday, April 4, even as the United States' easy conquest of Baghdad was already beginning, we followed John Keegan, the great British military historian in asking, with some worry, what was Saddam going to do with the major Republican Guard divisions he had so far refused to commit to the battle for his own capital. We still took seriously the possible threat of a major counterstroke against over-stretched U.S. forces, possibly using chemical weapons.
But within four further days, by Monday, the paralysis that Saddam had imposed on his own centralized decision-making structure had been succeeded by the process of total disintegration. Even if those other units could still have been capable of being used significantly on April 4 -- and all evidence suggests that command and control was still functioning reasonably as late as that -- by April 8 the process of full dissolution of the Iraqi military was well under way. And again, the turning point seems to have been news that filtered through the decision-making system on Monday night and through Tuesday morning.
Fourth, the key point here is that Saddam's writ still ran Monday morning throughout all the areas of Iraq where the U.S. armed forces and their British allies were not in direct control. But within two days, that no longer was true. What had changed?
Next: Exploding the myths
