'Hit List' Is Bad Policy
WASHINGTON — The 2,000-pound bomb, destined for Iraq, was signed by Dick Cheney and Colin L. Powell with the inscription: "To Saddam, with affection." Powell added a few choice words of his own: "You didn't move it, so now you lose it."
But this singular event did not happen on March 20, when U.S. Tomahawk cruise missiles and stealth aircraft struck a residential compound in southern Baghdad where it was believed that Saddam Hussein, his two sons and other top aides were gathered. The bomb-signing took place in Saudi Arabia in 1991 -- during the Gulf War. At the time, Vice President Cheney was secretary of Defense, Secretary of State Powell chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
The attempt to kill Hussein at the outset of the current war was triggered by information that CIA Director George J. Tenet brought to the president only hours before the airstrike. Hussein, the intelligence agency believed, was in a compound and would be a sitting duck for an attack. If the strike were successful, the war might be over before it began.
Afterward, there were reports that Hussein had been carried out on a stretcher and speculation that the Hussein with heavy horn-rimmed glasses who appeared on television was a double, and so on. But the Iraqi dictator has appeared on television several times since the attack to rally his troops, and he made specific references to the fighting in Basra and Baghdad. Unless his speeches were pretaped, it appeared that the attempt to kill him had failed. Even so, Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld and the White House raised questions last week about whether the Iraqi leader had died in the initial attack or was still among the living.
It was not the first time that the United States had sought to destroy a prominent figure with bombs or missiles. "Air assassination," as it were, has been tried in more than half a dozen instances.
Assassination, even in a military context, raises a host of questions -- practical, political, legal, moral. But two issues are central: Is assassination a good idea? And, how can the U.S. attempt to kill a foreign leader in view of a presidential executive order that specifically bans assassination?
The Hitler analogy is often cited by supporters of state-sponsored assassination. Knocking off Der Fuhrer would certainly have shortened World War II and perhaps saved millions of lives. But Adolf Hitler survived the time bomb left in his headquarters, and some of the plotters were hanged from meat hooks by nooses of piano wire wrapped around their necks.
