MGOH,

"Well, I'm glad they didn't go in guns blazing and give him what coudl have been presented as a hero's death. That showed a kind of professionalism which is not always evident in situations like that. But I would have thought that it wasn't a question of looking for clues - their informants seem to have been pretty specific in fingering Saddam."

All reports to date regarding the pinpointing of likely locations and in this particular sweep, there were two sites, are that it involved some painstaking work on the part of US Army intelligence analysts picking out fragments of information from around 25 people. I do not believe that his hiding place was deliberately given away by any one person or persons.

On what takes over regarding the government of Iraq, why do you automatically assume it will be one person? Either another Saddam or Tito like figure.

With explicit backing of the US? "Like Saddam when the CIA backed the coup that brought him to power."

I think you will find Kevin that the coup that the CIA backed was the one that brought the Ba'athists to power in Iraq - not Saddam Hussein. That coup he organised himself within the Ba'athist Party some years later - he needed no help from outside to accomplish that.