WHY DON'T WE KILL SADDAM?

Alasdair Palmer explains why our

leaders are too scared to sanction the assassination of a man they want dead

'THE WORLD will have trouble with Iraq SO long as Saddam Hussein is in power,' the new Vice-President of the United States, Mr Al Gore, observed last week. It has taken the American political establish- Ment an inordinately long time to realise an elementary truth. The Bush administra- tion, along with the CIA and the joint Chiefs of staff, seem never to have grasped It. Two years after the operation in which the Americans dropped more high explo- sive than in all of the second world war, Saddam is still there, thumbing his nose at them, relishing and exploiting every oppor- tunity to threaten Kuwait and the UN inspectorate. What went wrong with the War we fought two years ago? The truth is surprising. Nothing went wrong. 'Operation Desert Storm was designed to give Saddam a way of surviv- ing, General Michael Dugan told me this Week. 'He was thought to be better than alternatives. He might be a bit brutal, but at least he wasn't a mad mullah, which is What Bush thought he would get if he top- Pled Saddam. Schwartzkopf didn't push on to Baghdad because Bush wanted to save Saddam General Dugan should know. He was the US airforce chief of staff until he was abruptly fired during the Gulf war — for s,uggesting that part of the point of bomb- ing Iraq was to eliminate Saddam Hussein. Well, wasn't that part of the point of the rmbing? 'Not according to Cheney [the uefence Secretary] and Bush. To them the goal was to neutralise Saddam's command and control centres, not Saddam himself,' Ueneral Dugan insists. Such solicitude for a ruler who has gassed his own people, raped Kuwait and much worse from our point of view threatened to take personal control of the price of oil, was bizarre at the time. Two Years on, the scale of the misjudgment !i.eans that, if we want to control him, we will have to go to war with him all over again.

What is even more galling is that George 1Plish knew what he — and we — would be for if he let Saddam survive. On his _thanksgiving Day speech in 1990, Bush told the world that 'if we don't get Saddam now, we'll just have to go back and get him in five years' time'. Apart from the fact that it has taken two years, not five, for Saddam to re-emerge as a threat, that judgment was remarkably prescient.

So why did Bush and his commanders cast aside the opportunity, when it was there? The usual response is that the UN mandate stretched only to ejecting Sad- dam from Kuwait, not toppling him from power. If his fall turned out to be a side- effect, so be it. But it could not be made an explicit goal of the operation. Our Arab allies would not allow it. In the event that Saddam survived, blame the Arabs.

That line is disingenuous. Ridding the world of Saddam was an explicitly stated goal of the operation when President Bush and Prime Minister Major were trying to mobilise domestic support for war against Iraq. Poll after poll showed that British and American voters were not prepared to support a war to re-instal the Al-Sabah family as autocrats of Kuwait; nor even a war for the price of oil (as encapsulated by the popular verse 'Ain't gonna die for the price of gas. Hey, George Bush, kiss my ass.'). But they would back an operation to rid the world of Saddam. To fuel that mood, Bush called Saddam 'the new Hitler'. Americans would support action to rid the world of 'the new Hitler'. It was on that basis that there were popular demonstrations for Desert Storm.

Whatever the truth last time, the allies wish Saddam was dead now. So why aren't we actively engaged in bringing this about?

'I'm sorry to have to tell you, but you're just too common to have what the Queen has.' Assassination would be a quick, econom- ical solution, far more effective than bomb- ing raids or cruise missiles, which hit the wrong targets, including civilians, and whose principal function so far has been to increase Arab support for the loathsome Iraqi leader.

The question is all the more pertinent when the democracies of the world spend millions every year on their intelligence services and special operational forces. It is hard to believe that it is beyond combined resources of the American, British, French, Israeli and Russian secret services to locate Saddam and kill him.

It is surprising to have to report that none of them is even thinking of it. Several separate contacts — an ex-SAS man, an intelligence official — assure me that there have been, and are, no plans to kill Saddam Hussein.

The reason is not our leaders' delicate moral scruples about participating in acts of terrorism. The Americans proved they have no such aversion when they bombed Libya in 1986. That raid was an attempt to kill Gaddafi as the Libyan leader slept in his tent. We missed. Gaddafi's revenge was the bomb which blew up over Lockerbie, killing 291 people. For that matter, the point of the invasion of Panama three years later was to avert General Noriega and bring him to justice (in the United States). But when it comes to Saddam Hussein, Washington flaunts Executive Order 12333, which states that `no person employed by or acting on behalf of the US government shall engage in, or conspire to engage in, assassination'. That order was very obvious- ly a piece of PR issued in the collective moralising that followed Watergate and the discovery that the CIA had tried to kill Castro by sending him exploding cigars.

Executive order 12333 did not prevent the attempt to kill Gaddafi in 1986. Indeed, just before Desert Storm, Bush asked the Justice Department to look into whether it would make illegal an attempt on Saddam. Bush was advised that the President could both issue an exception to that ruling, and keep it secret.

But he did not take advantage of this advice. Nor will President Clinton. Our leaders fear the consequences of retalia- tion. If democratic leaders were to start assassinating tyrannical opponents, the tyrants could strike back in like manner. They would find it much easier to dispose of democratic leaders than the other way round. An American president, or a British prime minister, even, now, a Russian lead- er has to appear in public regularly. He has to campaign for re-election. No security service, however efficient, can prevent a democratic leader from being a sitting duck for a determined assassin. President Rea- gan was nearly killed by a lone adolescent with no friends and no education. If a kid with a gun can come within a hair's breadth of killing the world's most powerful leader, how easy the task would be for a group of Iraq's hit-men.

Leaders of democracies could not win a war waged by political assassination. They know they'd be killed first — which is why they won't ever order that kind of war. That, of course, leaves the other kind of war — the kind where heads of state order the deaths of people who are not of the same rank. That's the kind of war we can expect with Iraq. It would be much easier if the current crisis were to be solved by the quick assassination of Saddam Hus- sein, but unfortunately our leaders won't allow it. So long as they are killing only ordinary soldiers and citizens, our leaders know they won't get hurt. The alternative is too awful for them to contemplate.

One hundred years ago

ON MONDAY, the Khedive, without warning, deprived the Premier Mustapha Pasha Fehmy, and the Minis- ters of Finance and Justice, of their portfolios, and appointed Fakhri Pasha head of a new Government, Boutros Pasha Finance Minister, and Mazloum Pasha Minister of Justice. Not only were these Ministers men opposed to Eng- land, but the new Prime Minister had been removed in the time of Tewfik because of his violent opposition to reform; while Mazloum Pasha was also known as a supporter of the unreformed regime. At a moment's notice, therefore, the Government of Egypt had become both reactionary and anti-English, and our whole work in the Nile Valley was at stake. Fortunately, the Government realised that the moment was not one for inquiry, half measures, or dawdling in any shape or form. A special meeting of the Cabinet was held on Tuesday, and Lord Rosebery was authorised to allow Lord Cromer a free hand in deal- ing with the situation. Accordingly, Lord Cromer had an interview with the Khedive on Wednesday, and, backed up as he was in London, was soon able to convince Abbas Pasha of the error of judgment he had committed. In order to save the Khedive from humiliation, it was agreed, however, that Mustapha Pasha Fehmy should not be recalled, but that Riaz Pasha should be Prime Minister. The new Ministers of Finance and Justice are to be allowed to keep their portfolios. At the same time, Roul- lier Bey, who had been the Khedive's Professor when he was at school in Vienna, who accompanied him to Cairo as his secretary, and who was afterwards appointed "chief of the Khedive's Euro- pean Cabinet," will be sent on leave of absence. It is to his bad advice that the Khedive's precipitate and foolish action is in a great measure attributed. The Spectator 21 January 1893