read it and weep
After a week hunting the blogosphere and elsewhere for a rational Iraqi strategy I finally found Jihad in Mesopotamia

George W Bush personalized this war. Saddam played along, taking it to the battleground of the world, and especially Arab public opinion. Saddam has seized on his unique chance to be seen in many parts of the world, even though he might be detested, to be fighting a neocolonialist war, and to be seen in the Arab world as the only leader with enough courage to stand up to the superpower. Carefully calibrating his latest speech, drawing from a wealth of poetic resources in the Arabic language, and tapping on deep Arab and Muslim resentment against the United States, Saddam is also increasingly sounding like Osama bin Laden - who ironically despised the Iraqi leader as an infidel.

Saddam's guerrilla tactics have already proved to be somewhat effective. What for the Pentagon is a breakdown of central control is in fact the result of Saddam dividing Iraq into four largely autonomous military zones. The regime can count on support among three different forces: the Republican and Special Republican Guards; the paramilitary Fedayeen Saddam (Saddam's Men of Sacrifice), which has a total strength reportedly between 30,000 and 40,000 troops; and the complex alliances with Bedouin tribes, clans and sub-clans. The Guards, with two divisions already being bombed to oblivion on the outskirts of Baghdad, will be instrumental in the fierce, looming battle of Baghdad. The very mobile Fedayeen are resisting in the southern cities of Umm Qasr, Basra and Nasiriyah. And the tribes will be fighting in central Mesopotamia and the north to defend Arab honor, pride and most of all their own privileges, fully guaranteed as they are by the Ba'ath Party. Saddam is placing all his bets on an extremely brutal and much protracted war that will turn him into a Muslim hero with even wider appeal than bin Laden.

I was astonished when the coalition reached Nasiriya and Saddam did not order the bridges blown. They've been thinking the same thing over at the Daily Kos. The top answer is a plan to flood the central Iraq plain in a repeat of Saddam's tactics in the Iran-Iraq war. Saddam's history of hydraulic despotism is outlined at Scienceblog.