Ousted president Saddam Hussein did not plan the insurgency in Iraq because he thought the United States would never invade the country, a US military history has concluded.

Even with US armored columns 100 miles (161 kilometers) from Baghdad about to make their final push, Saddam apparently believed the war was going Iraq's way, according to the history, called "The Iraqi Perspectives Project."

"As far as can be determined from the interviews and records reviewed so far, there were no national plans to embark on a guerrilla war in the event of military defeat," it said.

"Nor did the regime appear to cobble together such plans as its world crumbled around it," it said.

"Buoyed by his earlier conviction that the Americans would never dare enter Baghdad, Saddam hoped to the very last minute that he could stay in power," it said.

Excerpts of the partially de-classified study for the US Joint Forces Command are being published in the May/June edition of Foreign Affairs, the journal of the Council on Foreign Relations. The study was written by Kevin Woods, James Lacey and Williamson Murray.

The history, an attempt to reconstruct the war from the Iraqi perspective, drew on interviews with dozens of captured senior Iraqi leaders and politicians and hundreds of thousands of official Iraqi documents.

It concluded, as others have, that Saddam Hussein had no weapons of mass destruction, but that he maintained ambiguity on the issue for fear that otherwise Israel might be encouraged to attack Iraq.

The magazine said that US intelligence in 2002 misinterpreted internal Iraqi messages about weapons of mass destruction, thinking they were being hidden when in fact the messages were about complying with UN inspections.

One message about removing the term "nerve agents" from "wireless instructions" was cited by former US secretary of state Colin Powell in his February 5, 2003 statement to the UN Security Council as an example of Iraq's bad faith, said the magazine.

Another misread Iraqi message also from 2002 referred to instructions to "search the area surrounding the headquarters camp and (the unit) for any chemical agents, make sure the area is free of chemical containers, and write a report on it."

"US analysts viewed this information through the prism of a decade of prior deceit. They had no way of knowing that this time the information reflected the regime's attempt to ensure it was in compliance with UN resolutions," said the article.

In late 2002, Saddam tilted toward trying to persuade the international community that Iraq had no weapons of mass destruction.

"But after years of purposeful obfuscation, it was difficult to convince anyone that Iraq was not once again being economical with the truth," the study said.

Saddam was convinced that France and Russia would prevent an invasion of Iraq to protect their economic interests, the study said, citing former Prime Minister Tareq Aziz.

Ibrahim Ahmad Abd al-Sattar, the Iraqi army and armed forces chief of staff, claimed that Saddam believed that even if the United States did launch a ground invasion, Washington would rapidly bow to international pressure to halt the war, the study said.

When the invasion did come, Saddam clung to the belief that it would end short of regime change, as the 1991 Gulf War had, it said.

"No Iraqi leaders had believed coalition forces would ever reach Baghdad," Sattar was quoted as saying.

Copyright © 2006 AFP

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