Although they’d had suspicions that we would hit them when the inspectors walked out, it turns out that the absence of visible preparations for the strike and the approach of Ramadan seem to have lulled them into a lackadaisical approach to their own preparations. Somebody put out the word to move the equipment and documents, the way they normally did; but nobody was in a hurry to do it; so they got caught with their pants down. And they totally didn’t expect us to take out the Ba’ath party headquarters and the intelligence headquarters—the “House of Pain,” as Iraqis called it, because of all the torturing that went on in there.

For a time, they were so dazed and rattled they were virtually headless.

After an attack, we could usually expect defiant rhetoric and all kinds of public posturing and bluster. But there was none of that. And there were reports that people had cheered when the “House of Pain” was hit.

Some of us even began to wonder about the stability of the regime; and I began to hear stories (told to my Arab friends by senior officers in the Republican Guard) that there may have been a move against it if the bombing had lasted a little while longer.

That we had really hurt them was confirmed again in January 1999, in Saddam’s yearly Army Day speech, when he viciously lashed out at all the other Arabs—blaming them for all the harm they had sanctioned, threatening reprisals, calling regional monarchs “throne dwarfs.” These were all people he hoped would feel sorry for him—or at least for his people. Showing such fury toward them was unheard of; it meant we’d hurt him really bad.

ALL THIS got me thinking: What if we had actually tipped the scale here? What if we’d hit Saddam or his sons, and that had somehow spurred the people to rise up? What if the country imploded and we had to deal with the aftermath?

Before Desert Fox, we’d looked at the possibility that we would have to execute the takedown of Saddam; but we always thought that would come after he attacked a neighbor or Israel, used WMD again on his own people, or committed some other atrocity so outrageous we’d have no choice but to go in there and turn over the regime.

“But what if it just collapsed?” I began to ask myself.

It didn’t take me long to figure out the answer to that: Somebody’d have to go in there to rebuild the country.

“Who?” I asked myself.

“As the CINC, I have a plan for militarily defeating Saddam. Doing that isn’t going to be hard. But after we defeat him, who takes care of reconstruction and all the attendant problems?”