So, maybe ... maybe it's been a relatively easily won war after all.

And of course, armed resistance has collapsed. Military analysts will be studying for years the non-appearance of the Republican Guard, the vanishing Iraqi army, the lack of organised urban guerrilla warfare. Perhaps shock and awe had their effect after all.

Historian John Keegan, Defence Editor of the Daily Telegraph, concluded that there had not been a war at all as Iraq had not put up a fight.

BBC

And with only around a thousand civilians killed. Perhaps fewer than the regime would torture to death in a good year.

So am I switching to thinking that the war was a good thing all along? I'm going to remain open minded on that. We'll see how this plays out.

A new picture is emerging of Saddam. Not a dangerous monster, not someone on the verge of unleashing weapons of mass destruction, not an evil tactical genius with the skill or ability to turn Baghdad into a Beirut style death trap for the US army. Just a puffed up, nasty, and very stupid dictator. A fall guy for the US, too vain and dumb not to play that role. Then idly swatted, wiped out without the army even noticing.

I stand by the prediction that on the WMD front, it's likely the US / UK will find nothing more than some attempts to build fairly inneffective chemical and biological weapons. Nothing which posed a significant danger. And no nuclear weapons programme worth speaking of.

Some of my friends think that the US and UK will just fake the evidence. I don't think so. I think there'll be enough feel-good factor from happy Iraqis that they'll just run the bits of evidence they do find, and make a big noise about how significant it is. The supporters and media will accept that. Some radical anti-war and anti-american journalists will complain, but the details are too subtle for the news media to convey significantly. If they hear the word "anthrax", people will nod and accept that WMD have been found. I hope the blogosphere can track and fact check this.

Building a civil society in Iraq will be difficult. The idea of dividing it into Kurd, Suni and Shi'ite zones is relatively smart. The Kurds can be given elections early to demonstrate the good intentions of the occupiers; while the military government assesses whether the Shi'ites can be allowed democracy without voting in a pro-Iranian government.

If terrorism haunts the new Iraq, the US will blame it on Iran and Syria rather than disaffection of the Iraqis themselves. The more terror there is, the more it re-enforces the view that the problem resides in the rest of the Islamicist world; and that this needs to be dealt with too.

In other words, for all the hot air generated, the neocon bastards in the US government look like they might get away with it.