Steve Coll at The New Yorker has written a piece about Cobra II, a book written about the study commissioned by the Bushies about Saddam Hussein's dictatorship, and the early phases of the Iraq war. Excerpt:

After the fall of Baghdad, three years ago, the United States military began a secret investigation of the decision-making within Saddam Hussein’s dictatorship. The study, carried out by the U.S. Joint Forces Command, drew on captured documents and interviews with former Baath Party officials and Iraqi military officers, and when it was completed, last year, it was delivered to President Bush. The full work remains classified, but “Cobra II,” a recently published book about the early phases of the war, by the Times reporter Michael Gordon and Lieutenant General Bernard Trainor, has disclosed parts of the study, and the Pentagon has released declassified sections, which Foreign Affairs has posted on its Web site. Reading them, it is easy to imagine why the Administration might resist publication of the full study. The extracts describe how the Iraq invasion, more than any other war in American history, was a construct of delusion. Frustratingly, however, we now understand much more about the textures of fantasy in Saddam’s palaces in early 2003 than we do about the self-delusions then prevalent in the West Wing.

The study seems to verify what many have speculated. Saddam was a shell of a leader, sanctions worked, and both sides deluded themselves. No wonder parts remain "classified".

If true, these revelations show leaders at a level of delusion comensurate with the fumbles and misunderstandings leading up to World War I. Saddam was drifting into mysticism and increasing paranoia, fearing a coup at any minute. He kept the myth alive of WMD out of fear of an attack by Iran. Saddam had no strategic plan to resist the U.S. invasion and apparently did not put insurgent "cells" in place. This, of course, lends even greater credibility to popularity of the uprising.

In the meantime, the U.S. leaders were also delusional about the existence of WMD, the efficacy of sanctions/inspections, and the real threat posed by Saddam. Apparently military leaders thought (correctly) that Rumsfeld was an idiot and that they were invading with inadequate resources.

It's ironic that both Saddam and Bush depended on the same delusion ... that Iraq had WMD. It's tragically criminal that hundreds of thousands of humans have to pay the price for the idiocy of these two morons.