"The Americans may be bogged down in Iraq. Even if they occupy Iraq, they will never be able to achieve their covert or overt objectives," defence analyst and former general Talat Masood told AFP.

"If the Iraqis put up stiff resistance and the casualties on both sides are heavy then this might turn into a long, drawn-out war."

General Hamid Gul, former chief of Pakistan military's Inter-Services Intelligence, said Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein's tactics of combining conventional war with guerrilla warfare marked a "new chapter in the history of war."

Saddam has not wasted the 12 years since the 1991 Gulf war, he said.

"He raised his own Fidayeen and Republican guards, motivated them, trained them and rehearsed them as a skilled force," Gul told AFP. "The Fidayeen are from his own Abu Ghaffari tribe. They are highly committed and determined troops bouyed by their own tribal pride."

US planners had "underestimated" the Iraqis, and early operations had gone awry, Gul said.

"It is an intelligence failure of enormous magnitude, worse than September 11" 2001, when hijacked aircraft crashed into the Pentagon and World Trade Center.

"The Iraq war can entangle them into a long guerrilla war," he said, adding that fighters from the Palestinian insurgency Hamas and other Gulf-area militants could join the fight against the US and British forces in a "crescendo" of Arab nationalism.

Gul warned that the looming hot summer in Iraq would add to the difficulties faced by US and British troops.

"It is going to be a long and difficult haul for them unless they go for scorched earth policy and destroy all villages and routes."

Former chairman of the Institute of Strategic Studies, retired general Kamal Matinuddin, said that while people had differences with Saddam Hussein, now was a question of "foreign forces occupying their country.

"The resistance so far shown by Fidayeen is very tough. They are ready to die as their very name depicts."

Matinuddin noted the imbalance in favour of the coalition and said: "They are going to win the battle but they are not going to win the heart of the Iraqi people."

Added Masood: "People may not like Saddam but they don't consider US subjugation is an alternative."

The war is, globally, "very, very unpopular," said Matinuddin, and has robbed the United States of the goodwill it earned in its war against terrorism after the September 11 attacks, said Masood.

"Bush has been challenging everyone that 'you are either with us or you are with our foes' and mustered an international coalition against its war on terrorism, but the US is now on the back foot," Masood said.

US plans to leave Iraq in the care of a US military commander after the invasion have not endeared it to the Iraqi people, he said.

"I know they had prepared this plan three months ago and they had been training opposition people in Hungary on how to run post-Saddam Iraq and even allocated portfolios in the future government," Masood said.

"But the Iraqi people will not accept them. They will be their Karzais," he said referring to the administration of Afghan leader Hamid Karzai, which has faced criticism that it is merely a US pawn.

WAR.WIRE