Whatever policy the Americans pursue for Saddam's capital, his supporters are obviously incapable of mounting a coherent defence through the streets, on 1945 Berlin lines. To achieve that, one needs fanatics with the military skills of the Waffen SS, and there are none in Saddam's forces.

They have shown themselves fantasists of a kind familiar in the service of tyrants: masters of bombast, more comfortable in the torture chamber than on the battlefield.

The Allies take seriously the guerrilla threat that could be posed by some hundreds of would-be fighters who have been filtering into the country from Syria and to a lesser extent from Iran. But this is a problem for the security of Allied-occupied Iraq, rather than a danger to victory.

This war has provided yet another lesson on the chasm between a Western culture that means what it says, and a culture extravagant in the use of words, such as that which pervades most of the Arab world.

The Americans and British are literal-minded people. We encounter difficulties in diplomacy with the Irish or the Spanish or the Chinese, never mind the Iraqis, because other societies possess a different attitude to verbiage.

Before the war, many Western pundits found it difficult to believe that Saddam's people could deliver so many blood-curdling threats, without having some practical notion about how to implement them. Yet this week, few Iraqi units have stayed around to fight the Americans, and those that did so have been easily eliminated.