Molly Moore does quite a good job of at least starting the discussion.
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The rapid disintegration was largely preordained, Iraqis said. The Iraqi military was composed of disparate and competing armies with no central command authority, top generals inexplicably ordered some units not to fight, and security precautions left officers unable to communicate or to coordinate battle plans, according to interviews with more than two dozen former general officers and other field commanders serving in the regular army and special military units.
By the time the war began, most of the Iraqi air force's fighter planes had been disassembled and hidden, many air defense units were under orders not to turn on their radars and artillery batteries were operating at 50 percent capability, military leaders said.
In the end, former president Saddam Hussein was undercut not only by the destruction wrought by the Americans but by an Iraqi regular military that felt little loyalty to a leader who paid his special armies better salaries and intimidated generals into lying about the dilapidated state of his armed forces, the senior officers said.
Though it is impossible to independently verify the accounts provided by the officers interviewed over the past week, the close parallels among experiences described by military leaders from field units, headquarters divisions and special forces assigned to a wide variety of locations buttressed their credibility. Only a handful of the officers requested that their names be withheld.
Every commander interviewed said that despite the anxiety of U.S. officials, no Iraqi military unit had been issued chemical or biological weapons.
And while U.S. military leaders had also feared a bloodbath in the streets of Baghdad, all the commanders said their men were not under orders to fall back into the capital and wage urban warfare. Rather, they said, their men deserted or retreated with the aim of self-preservation. Some commanders said they ordered their soldiers to defend their homes and families, but did not tell them to take offensive action against Americans.
Thank about the implications of just that quote from a much longer article.
Let's concede Saddam's hold on power wasn't dependent on the love of his subjects, though, when you're hoping for a regime change, hatred of the regime by those it rules ain't chopped liver.
Even if we concede that his hold on power was synonymous with his hold on the Baathist institutions of governance, including the use of arbitrary terror, the question a piece of reporting like this underscores is this; was there really no other way than a full scale invasion to loosen Saddam's grasp on power sufficiently to allow the Iraqi people to take the lead in getting rid of him?