The report, entitled "Saddam's Delusions: The View from the Inside," was produced by the Pentagon's Iraq's Perspectives Project and written by Kevin Woods, James Lacey and Williamson Murray. It was commissioned by the U.S. Joint Forces Command, or USJFCOM, and it is based on previously inaccessible primary sources, Foreign Affairs magazine said. Extracts from the report are being published in an 8,500 word article in the May-June issue of Foreign Affairs.

The USJFCOM documents that even as U.S.-led coalition forces massed on Iraq's borders in early 2003, Saddam remained convinced there would be no invasion -- and he believed that even if there were, he and his regime would survive.

"Saddam believed that the United States was a paper tiger and that France and Russia would protect him," Foreign Affairs wrote.

"Ignorant of military history, logistics, and technology, Saddam lived in a bubble due to the atmosphere of fear he had had instilled throughout his civil and military bureaucracies," the magazine said. Therefore, "once the war actually began, its ultimate result was a foregone conclusion."

The article confirms recent assessments that Saddam had no weapons of mass destruction before he was toppled, but it says that he wanted others to suspect he might. "In the last months before the war he realized that it was too dangerous to continue playing this double game and finally decided to cooperate fully with international inspectors. But at that point his track record of repeatedly lying meant that no one believed him," Foreign Affairs said.

Even on the brink of the war that would topple him and shatter his power, Saddam's greatest concern remained "preventing a coup," Foreign Affairs said.

"This allowed him to stay in power, but it meant that his armed forces were almost completely ineffective at dealing with actual military operations against a competent foreign enemy," it said.

"Every senior commander interviewed after the start of hostilities emphasized the psychological costs of being forced to constantly look over his shoulder," the report wrote.

The report also rejected the widespread view in many Bush administration and neo-conservative circles in Washington that Saddam deliberately planned the current insurgency in Iraq.

"No. He thought the United States would never attack, and was confident that even if it did, the resulting war would follow essentially the same script as the first Gulf War in 1991, without a full-scale invasion all the way to Baghdad," Foreign Affairs wrote, describing the report.

"He did pre-position a lot of military materiel around the country before the war started, but only to disperse it and keep it safe, so that it would be available either in the later stages of a long and drawn-out campaign against the coalition, or to reestablish control at home afterwards (as he did in 1991, when the Kurds and Shia revolted).

"As far as can be determined from the interviews and records reviewed so far, there were no national plans to embark on a guerrilla war in the event of military defeat. Nor did the regime appear to cobble together such plans as its world crumbled around it," the report said.

"The regime ordered the (prewar) distribution of ammunition (around the country) in order to preserve it for a prolonged war with coalition forces," it said.

The report concludes that Saddam was so out of touch with events in the totalitarian bubble that he was convinced the war was still going brilliantly well when everything was collapsing all around him.

"How did Saddam think the war was going? Swimmingly. Because everyone knew that Saddam severely punished anybody who told him unpleasant truths, the entire regime was built on lies. During wartime, this meant that junior officers told senior officers that everything was going well, they reported it up the chain of command, and Saddam himself remained a prisoner of his delusions," Foreign Affairs said.

"As late as the end of March 2003, Saddam apparently still believed the war to be going the way he had expected. If Iraq was not actually winning it, neither was it losing -- or, at least, so it seemed to the dictator," the report said. "...The evidence now clearly shows that Saddam and those around him believed virtually every word issued by their own propaganda machine."

That was why, the report, said, on March 30, "Saddam's principal secretary directed the Iraqi foreign minister to tell the French and Russian governments that Baghdad would accept only an 'unconditional withdrawal' of U.S. forces because 'Iraq is now winning and ... the United States has sunk in the mud of defeat.' At that moment, U.S. tanks were a hundred miles south of Baghdad, refueling and rearming for the final push."

The report looks unlikely to trigger any sea-change in American popular perceptions of the war. But it may make it even more difficult for the White House and the Republican Party to counter the steady slide in the president's popular standing since the delayed and botched responses to Hurricane Katrina last summer.

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