- On the evening of Feb. 27, 1991, only hours before George
W. Bush's father called a halt to Operation Desert Storm, two US Air Force
F-111 bombers, callsigns Cardinal 1 and 2, dropped two 1,800-kilogram penetration
bombs on an underground bunker near Al-Taji Air Base, northwest of Baghdad,
which senior Iraqi commanders were known to use. The huge bombs, known
as GBU-28s, had been specially made to target Saddam Hussein and had been
flown to Taif Air Base in Saudi Arabia in a giant C-141 transport from
Florida only five hours earlier.
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- The raid was the Americans' last desperate bid to kill
the Iraqi leader before the cease-fire took effect. Cardinal 1 swept in
from the east and dropped its bomb, but it missed. Cardinal 2 scored a
direct hit, destroying the bunker buried 15 meters underground, which earlier
strikes with 900-kilogram "penetrators" had failed to knock out.
Several hours later US military commanders learned that Saddam had not
been in the bunker, as they had hoped.
-
- Now, 12 years on, Saddam faces renewed attempts to kill
him as Bush the younger picks up where his father left off. But this time,
the game has changed. Bush the younger is out to wipe the slate clean and
seems to be prepared to rid himself of the troublesome tyrant by any and
all means. He wants Saddam out of the way, "dead or alive." He
said the same thing about Osama bin Laden, but that nemesis still eludes
the American president. Without bin Laden's scalp on his belt - to use
the cowboy idiom that Bush has chosen to characterize his war against terrorism
- Saddam has become a convenient substitute.
-
- White House spokesman Ari Fleischer made it abundantly
clear on Oct. 1 that the administration would be only too happy to see
Saddam assassinated - by his own people, of course. US law prohibits the
assassination of foreign leaders, but Bush and his gung-ho defense secretary,
Donald Rumsfeld, have given the Central Intelligence Agency and the military's
special forces virtual carte blanche to ensure that Saddam gets taken down
once and for all by whatever means necessary.
-
- Fleischer's comments were the bluntest made by a senior
administration official about the options of achieving "regime change"
in Iraq without a war. Asked about congressional cost estimates of $9 billion-$13
billion for a start-up for the war against Iraq, he said that Bush had
not yet made the decision to go to war, adding: "I can only say that
the cost of a one-way ticket is substantially less than that. The cost
of one bullet, if the Iraqi people take it upon themselves, is substantially
less than that."
-
- He hastened to add: "This is not a statement of
administration policy. The point is that if the Iraqis took matters into
their own hands, no one around the world would shed a tear. Regime change
is welcome in whatever form it takes."
- Whatever way Bush and his advisers put it, there seems
little doubt the decision has been made to kill Saddam if the opportunity
presents itself. Officials have said, for instance, that there are no plans
to put Saddam on trial for war crimes or crimes against humanity, such
as repeatedly and systematically using poison gas against his own people,
at The Hague or anywhere else. The brutal dictator whom Trent Lott, the
Republican leader in the Senate , has taken to calling "So Damn Insane"
is firmly in America's crosshairs again. His death is an implicit aim of
efforts to establish a US-backed regime in Baghdad.
-
- During the six-week air campaign in 1991, 260 of 36,046
"strike sorties" were designated "L" for leadership.
That was less than 1 percent of the bombing missions, but these attacks,
which included Saddam's palaces and other buildings he was known to frequent,
were intended to decapitate the regime. No doubt, similar attacks will
be mounted in the looming war.
-
- Robert Gates, then a national security adviser and later
director of the CIA, recalled that the White House of Bush the elder "lit
a candle every night hoping that Saddam Hussein would be killed in a bunker.
Those candles will be lit again if we have to bomb again. Command and control
sites will be targeted and we hope that Saddam's in one of them."
- Assassinating Saddam would be the most obvious and expedient
way of getting rid of him. But it is prohibited by Executive Order No.
11905, signed by President Gerald Ford on Feb. 18, 1976, following political
scandals caused by bungled CIA efforts to assassinate foreign leaders in
the 1960s and early 1970s. The Senate Select Committee on Intelligence,
remembered as the Church Committee, concluded on Nov. 20, 1975, that plots
against five foreign leaders under Presidents Dwight Eisenhower, John F.
Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon were deliberately organized in
terms "so ambiguous that it is difficult to be certain at what levels
assassination activity was known and authorized."
-
- That simple 22-word document was endorsed by three successive
presidents - Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan and George Bush (the elder) and
was enshrined in its present form - "No person employed or acting
on behalf of the United States government shall engage in, or conspire
to engage in, assassinations - by Executive Order No. 12333, signed by
Reagan, on Dec. 4, 1981. But this has not prevented the US from carrying
out operations against foreign leaders, usually under the guise of "military
operations" rather than singling out individuals, a fine distinction
by any standard.
-
- Since Sept. 11, 2001, demands that the presidential ban
on assassinations be rescinded - which Bush the younger can do without
consulting lawmakers - have swelled significantly with little public opposition.
How far tempers have cooled amid the beat of Bush's war drums is not clear,
but only a few political voices have cautioned against removing such restraints
that would mark a dramatic change in the ethics of US foreign policy. If
Bush formally declares war against Iraq, Saddam would automatically become
a legitimate target.
-
- Secretary of State Colin Powell has said that rules governing
military and intelligence operations, including Ford's 1976 ban on assassinations,
were under review. "We have to have the authority to assassinate people
before they can assassinate us," said Senator Bob Graham, who chairs
the Senate Intelligence Committee.
-
- Given Bush's warlike rhetoric and his espousal of pre-emptive
strikes against those deemed enemies of the US, it would seem reasonable
to assume that he is in favor of lifting the ban. In July, the CIA ditched
its 1995 guidelines limiting agents' freedom to recruit "dirty"
informers - people involved in criminal or terrorist activities - in the
field after Congress criticized the agency's failure to penetrate Al-Qaeda
and learn of bin Laden's plans for the suicide attacks that killed more
than 3,000 people last year.
-
- Apart from the vexing moral questions that jettisoning
the assassination ban would raise, it would also emphasize the Bush administration's
hypocrisy in denouncing Israel's policy of assassinating Palestinian militants,
what the administration euphemistically calls "targeted killings."
This is an issue that has drawn the ire of Israel's supporters in Congress,
who have branded it a "double standard." No doubt, if Bush rescinds
the ban, it would mean his administration would no longer be able to criticize
Israel's actions, intensifying the growing anti-US hostility sweeping the
Arab world.
-
- Bill Clinton paved the way for stepping up clandestine
operations by US military and intelligence forces. He authorized covert
lethal force against Al-Qaeda in 1998, including shooting down private
aircraft if the Saudi renegade or his lieutenants were believed to be aboard,
and ordered the CIA to train and equip surrogate forces in Afghanistan,
Uzbekistan and Pakistan to kill or capture bin Laden. A 60-strong Pakistani
commando team was poised to strike in October 1999, but the operation was
canceled when General Pervez Musharraf deposed Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif
in a military coup.
-
- And shortly after the carnage of Sept. 11, 2001, Bush
the younger was reported to have signed a more comprehensive "presidential
finding" which concluded that the executive orders banning assassination
did not prevent the president from lawfully singling out a terrorist for
death by covert action by intelligence agencies. Whether that would cover
Saddam is not clear, but given Bush's efforts to link the Iraqi leader
to Al-Qaeda, that is probably the case.
-
- On Sept. 17, 2001, six days after the suicide attacks
on America, Bush declared Osama bin Laden "wanted dead or alive."
Fleischer said Executive Order 12333 remained in effect, but insisted that
"it does not inhibit the nation's ability to act in self-defense."
No doubt this could be bent to include Saddam and his cronies.
-
- Away from the legalistic hoops of the presidential orders,
the ban has left some wriggle room and US administrations have shown little
hesitation in targeting foreign leaders through military action, where
a separate chain of command is involved and which uses separate legal instruments
for such operations. The Reagan administration hatched several plots to
eliminate Moammar Gadhafi, including one by the notorious Colonel Oliver
North, who helped plunge the Reagan presidency into near-collapse through
the 1986 Iran-Contra scandal.
-
- In the event, US bombers attacked Tripoli and Benghazi
on the night of April 5, 1986, including the Azziziya Barracks in the capital,
listed as a "terrorist-related target," where the Libyan leader
was sleeping in a tent in the courtyard.
- Planners insisted that they were not targeting Gadhafi
- that might have been just a little too close to assassination - but
aiming at command-and-control centers. If Gadhafi just happened to be under
one of their bombs or rockets, that would just have been his tough luck.
Gadhafi survived.
-
- The issue arose again with Bush the elder's invasion
of Panama on Dec. 29, 1989, by 24,000 troops who seized General Manuel
Noriega, an indicted drug trafficker accused of threatening US lives, and
removed him from power. Abraham Sofaer, then the State Department's chief
legal adviser, said both the Reagan and Bush administrations had "concluded
that the assassination prohibition relates to assassination, which is really
a form of murder, and that military actions do not constitute assassinations."
-
- Thus, it was that during the 1999 NATO air campaign against
Yugoslavia, President Slobodan Milosevic's mansion was attacked, even though
assassinating him was not supposed to be an option for the US. Milosevic
was not harmed during the US bombing strike. The Defense Department's spokesman
at the time, Kenneth Bacon, declared with a straight face: "We're
not targeting President Milosevic or the Serb people. We're targeting the
military and the military infrastructure that supports the instruments
of oppression in Kosovo."
-
- The then-deputy attorney-general, Eric Holder, said the
bombing of Milosevic's home was within the guidelines given to the military
by the Justice Department, which included "command and control facilities."
-
- The scenario of senior Iraqis overthrowing Saddam - the
so-called "silver bullet" approach - has been central to CIA
efforts to bring down the regime. But the administration should not expect
too much in its hope that Saddam's domestic opponents, not inhibited by
US executive orders, will kill him or depose him on their own. Saddam,
who is paranoid about his personal security, has survived dozens of coup
plots and assassination attempts since he took power from his kinsman,
Ahmed Hassan al-Bakr, on July 17, 1979, after a decade of being the real
power as Bakr's deputy.
-
- He is reported to have a protection force of some 10,000
handpicked troops. He is believed to have at least three lookalikes, some
of whom underwent plastic surgery, to confuse his enemies. He rarely makes
public appearances and, according to defectors, his movements are known
only to a few trusted aides around him, who are the only ones with direct
access to him.
-
- The Clinton administration was primarily confined to
a policy of "containing" Saddam, but it also authorized the biggest
CIA operation since the 1979-89 Afghan war in an attempt to undermine his
rule. A 1994-95 CIA-sponsored plot involving exiled Iraqi military and
political leaders based in Amman to get senior Iraqi Army officers to kill
or seize Saddam and establish a new regime fell apart disastrously after
Saddam's agents infiltrated the group and executed those involved inside
Iraq.
-
- In August 1995, CIA agents had to flee Iraqi Kurdistan,
protected since 1991 by an allied no-fly zone, when Saddam sent his troops
in to teach Kurdish rebels a lesson. But now by all accounts the CIA, as
well as military special forces teams, are back and plotting to get Saddam,
preferably dead.
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- Copyright© 2000 The Daily Star. All rights reserved.
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