According to the NY Times, Saddam apparently didn’t do too well in those late-night dorm poker games.

A complacent Saddam Hussein was so convinced that war would be averted or that America would mount only a limited bombing campaign that he deployed the Iraqi military to crush domestic uprisings rather than defend against a ground invasion, according to a classified log of interrogations of captured Iraqi leaders and former officers.

Mr. Hussein believed that a “casualty averse” White House would order a bombing campaign that Iraq could withstand, according to the secret report, prepared for the Pentagon’s most senior leadership and dated Jan. 26. And the Iraqi Defense Ministry, in a grand miscalculation, believed that any ground offensive would come across the Jordanian border.

And I’m more and more convinced of some variant of my ‘Bad Software‘ where-are-the-WMD theory.

Dr. Kay, the former chief C.I.A. weapons inspector, has said that his team learned that no Special Republican Guard units had chemical or biological weapons — but that all of the officers believed that some other Special Republican Guard unit had them. He said it appeared that the Iraqi officers were the victims of a disinformation campaign by Mr. Hussein.

…

The interrogations yielded a portrait of a government disconnected from reality in peace and in war, where members of Mr. Hussein’s inner circle routinely lied to him and each other about Iraqi military capacities.

And, I guess there’s humor in the notion that they were so paranoid they couldn’t believe that it was us calling, as opposed to Saddam:

When a wave of calls went out to the private telephone numbers of selected officials inside Iraq, asking them to turn against Mr. Hussein and avoid war, the Arabic speakers making the calls were so fluent that the recipients did not believe the calls were from Americans.

Instead, the Iraqis believed the calls were part of a “loyalty test” mounted by Mr. Hussein’s secret services, the officials said during questioning. Afraid of arrest, incarceration, torture and even death, they refused to cooperate.

What a bunch of evil clowns.