The officer, who was not named, gave a graphic account of the furious attacks his 600-man unit faced, the toll it took and how and why the soldiers abandoned their positions.

He said soldiers were not forced to fight and that many in fact slipped away to their homes when they realized how outgunned they were.

The Republican Guard units defending Baghdad were told, "just stay in your positions and hide from the bombs," the colonel said, interviewed in his Baghdad home.

"But from the beginning power was not equal. Something hit us, the aircraft destroyed our tanks and equipment," he said.

He said that from the onset of the fighting "every day one, two, three" soldiers would "leave his gun and go away" to flee the bombing.

"We (did) not force anyone to fight," said the man, who identified himself as an officer.

He said he had "not received any order" to force his soldiers to stay and fight.

Before the war started, television would show Saddam Hussein in a meeting with most of his officers, he said.

"If they say to him we have no power to face this army (the Americans), it is not a good war, he maybe will kill" the officers.

So he said the officers would agree with Saddam, regardless of whether the plan was "good or not."

However the plan was "not good" and a sign of this was that Baghdad airport was not shut down, making it easy for the Americans to seize it, the officer said.

"If you leave your home open, the thieves will enter very easily," he said.

The Republican Guards did not want to engage in street fighting in Baghdad, despite allied forces being convinced they would make a last stand in the capital, he added.

The Iraqi soldiers' families were there and then "everything (can be) broken that's yours, so if I fight in my city, every building is mine... those are our families, our babies," he said.

"If you want to fight, you should fight (away from) your home," he said.

The main problem, he said, was that no one told the troops what to do.

Military analyst Michael Clarke told a seminar in London Friday that the invasion of Iraq had in fact "worked out almost as well as the Pentagon could have hoped."

Clarke, director for defence studies at the International Policy Institute of the University of London, said what was "obvious (was) the power of armored warfare in a modern context, the sheer firepower that can be brought to bear."

"What's less obvious is that that armored thrust, or the potency of those thrusts, is achieved by historically unique corporations between air and ground forces," he said.

He said this integration created "what the Americans have always wanted to create, a very short time between sensor and shooter, between sending a target that was worthwhile, confirming it and being able to shoot at it."

It was such a combined air and ground assault that destroyed the Republican Guard units defending Baghdad.

Sir Timothy Garden, an analyst at the Center for Defence Studies in King's College London, said: "An awful lot of what was achieved was achieved through good intelligence with precision air attacks which did actually compromise the command and control arrangements very effectively."

He said that when Iraqi forces were thus isolated, as the interviewed colonel's unit was, they had "to act independently and weren't very good at that because in a totalitarian state you're not encouraged to act independently."

SPACE.WIRE