Let's take a closer look:

By now, many have read about the British Intelligence Dossier that contained material which was "lifted from magazines and academic journals". That's an interesting story, but we decided to look at the dossier and see what it had to say. Number 10 Downing Street provides a link to the full report, and there is a facts section, which allows you to read about "Iraq's network of intelligence and security" (200k pdf, 60k Word). Which we did. And then we decided to diagram the information:




The purpose of this exercise was to see how big (and bad) Hussein's domestic police is. From the looks of things, there aren't all that many people devoted to civilian control. Perhaps 20,000 in a country of 24 million. One in a thousand. (We strongly suspect that's a smaller ratio than that which prevailed in East Germany back in the Stasi days.) In any event, it may not be true that the Iraqis are wildly in favor of a regime change. Thus, the quick collapse predicted by administration hawks might not happen - and a longer, more difficult fight may be in store for U.S. troops.

posted by Quiddity at 2/09/2003 10:28:00 AM