Con Coughlin has an interesting assessment in the Telegraph - This was the 'tip' moment that coalition commanders had been waiting for:
Even if Saddam did manage to escape the blast, the attack nevertheless accomplished the aims of the CentCom planners. Within 24 hours of the attack being carried out, what remained of Saddam's Ba'athist infrastructure in Baghdad had simply disappeared. Not even Mohammed Saeed al-Sahhaf, Saddam's indefatigable information minister, bothered to show up to make his Alice in Wonderland proclamations that no such bombing raid had ever taken place, and even if it had, none of the Ba'athist leadership, and certainly not Saddam, would have come to any grief.That's the biz, sweethearts.
This was the "tip" moment that coalition commanders had been waiting for, the moment when a monolithic dictatorship suddenly implodes. The same had happened the previous week in Basra where a carefully targeted bombing raid on the residence of Ali Hassan al-Majid, or "Chemical Ali", Saddam's first cousin and the man responsible for administering the Ba'athist infrastructure in Iraq's second city, had resulted in Ba'athists renouncing control of the city.
In Basra the Ba'athist collapse was predicated by the fact that Chemical Ali had almost certainly died in the SAS-sponsored airstrikes (the devastation of his home was such that it may be some weeks before forensic experts have sufficient material upon which to conduct conclusive DNA tests).
The Ba'athist collapse in Baghdad followed the same pattern. Apart from Saddam and his immediate circle, an estimated 50 senior Ba'athist officials are believed to have been inside the al-Mansour complex, including Sahhaf and Tariq Aziz, Saddam's long-serving deputy prime minister. As nothing has been heard of either man since the bombs hit their target, intelligence officials are now coming to the conclusion that their remains lie buried beneath the tons of concrete rubble that now mark the site.
