- DOHA (Reuters) - The CIA's
efforts to eliminate Saddam Hussein over the years seemed so comic that
Hollywood made spoof movies on the theme, with Charlie Sheen as a bungling,
muscle-bound Ninja assassin.
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- They don't look so funny now. Saddam's forces are outgunned
and there is an army marching on his capital, with commando teams vying
for his head. Now we know why he is paranoid: it's because they're trying
to kill him.
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- The celluloid Saddam looked startlingly like the man
who spoke on Iraqi television shortly after his bunker was bombed at dawn
on Thursday, wearing outsize glasses, an improbable mustache and a beret
from central casting.
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- Was it really the Iraqi president? The man is said to
have so many doubles that U.S. intelligence still is not saying for sure.
But his past escapes from U.S. "justice" also suggest he has
more lives than a cat.
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- The Saddam shown with top aides, including Deputy Prime
Minister Tareq Aziz in film shown on Friday sat half in shadow, looking
grim and gray as if he had had a brush with death or suffered heavy loss.
The Washington Post quoted U.S. sources as saying Saddam, possibly with
one or both of his sons, was in the compound when it was hit.
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- The biggest "shock and awe" Washington could
produce in its onslaught against the Baghdad regime would be to eliminate
Iraq's undisputed leader of the past 24 years, the man whose name means
"he who resists." His death means their victory.
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- If Iraqi TV rigged the films, Saddam may already be dead.
Failing proof, we must assume he is still alive and facing the biggest
test of nerve in a dramatic career -- the first overt American bid to kill
him, backed by a whole army.
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- DECAPITATION
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- The so-called "decapitation" attack shortly
after Washington's ultimatum to Saddam ran out on Thursday was nothing
new either in the annals of war or in the case of Saddam. In the 1991 Gulf
War, there were 260 attacks on "leadership" targets and 600 on
"command and control" centers.
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- Saddam himself was actively sought but proved elusive.
He had the "utmost attention" of air war planners.
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- The closest U.S. forces may have come to killing him
was when he went to Basra in southern Iraq in the middle of the air war
to see his commanders. A pair of U.S. F-16 warplanes spotted a convoy and
attacked it. But the fact Saddam was in it was not known to U.S. intelligence
at the time, and he escaped unhurt.
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- Later, the U.S. dispatched stealth jets to attack planes
on an airstrip where intelligence reports said Saddam and his family were
preparing to flee to Mauritania.
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- "And now we have Saddam Hussein still there,"
the current U.S. president's father George Bush said in famously subdued
remarks after 600,000 coalition troops scored a speedy triumph in the 1991
Gulf War but left Saddam to fight another day.
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- Three months later, Bush Senior signed an order authorizing
the CIA to ... "create conditions for the removal of Saddam Hussein
from power" ... through covert action, a euphemism for assassination.
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- The euphemism is still in heavy use, each time U.S. laser
and satellite-guided bombs and missiles target Baghdad ..."command
and control centers."
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- CHENEY SIGNS BOMB
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- "To Saddam, with fond regards," then-defense
secretary Dick Cheney wrote on a 2,000-pound bomb due to strike Baghdad
from the bay of a black F-117A stealth jet in 1991.
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- But even in the dying hours of the war, two F-111s carrying
GBU-28 bunker-buster bombs weighing 4,700 pounds each were dropped on a
bunker near Taji in a last bid to kill Saddam -- who was not there.
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- In 1993, the Clinton Administration secretly renewed
the CIA's authorization to topple Saddam, by now the most electronically
bugged man on the planet.
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- A CIA-backed internal coup was the chosen method. But
in 1996, Iraqi agents intercepted a messenger and infiltrated the conspiracy.
When Saddam gave the order to pounce, the eventual purge numbered some
800 plotters and suspects.
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- "We have arrested all of your people. You might
as well pack up and go home," said Saddam's Mukhabarat intelligence
service in one reported message intercept. And the CIA did.
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- Several times during the Gulf War, U.S. intelligence
believed it knew where Saddam had slept the previous night, but it never
had the real-time information to target his bed for the coming night.
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- After U.S. bombs killed some 400 civilians in a Baghdad
bunker, downtown "leadership" targets were placed off limits
by a politically sensitive White House.
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- The same hitch could arise again should there be any
targeting slipups resulting in major "collateral damage" -- which
may explain George W. Bush's eagerness this week to throw away the war
script and seize on the chance of killing Saddam.
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