So, did Saddam really try to kill Bush's
dad? By Jim Lobe
WASHINGTON -
Now that US President George W Bush's allegations about
former Iraqi president Saddam Hussein's ties to al-Qaeda
and ambitious weapons programs have been thoroughly
discredited, another outstanding charge remains to be
resolved. During a campaign speech in September 2002,
Bush cited a number of reasons - in addition to alleged
terrorist links and weapons of mass destruction (WMD) -
concerning why Saddam was so dangerous to the United
States, noting in particular, "After all, this is the
guy who tired to kill my dad."
He was referring,
of course, to an alleged plot by Iraqi intelligence to
assassinate Bush's father, former president George H W
Bush, during his triumphal visit to Kuwait in April
1993, 25 months after US-led forces chased Iraqi troops
out of Kuwait in the first Gulf War and three months
after Bush Sr surrendered the White House to Bill
Clinton.
Although he did not name his father,
Bush Jr also cited the assassination attempt in his
September 2002 address at the United Nations General
Assembly, where he called on the UN Security Council to
approve a tough resolution demanding that Saddam fully
give up his (non-existent) WMD and weapons programs.
While the alleged plot was never cited
officially as a cause for going to war, some pundits -
including Maureen Dowd of the New York Times - have
speculated that revenge or some oedipal desire to show
up his father may indeed have been one of the factors
that drove him to Baghdad - as the sign of one
demonstrator suggested in a big anti-war march here just
before the war: "I love my dad, too, but come on!"
The circumstances of the alleged plot, which
ended in a trial and the conviction of 11 Iraqis and
three Kuwaitis, have always evoked skepticism, although
Clinton himself was apparently sufficiently convinced
after receiving reports from the Federal Bureau of
Investigation (FBI) and Central Intelligence Agency
(CIA) to order a missile strike on the Iraqi
intelligence headquarters in Baghdad that killed six
civilians in June 1993.
But a closer look at the
11-year-old plot, particularly in light of the findings
by the Iraq Survey Group (ISG), the special team of
experts that spent 15 months investigating Baghdad's WMD
programs, that they were all dismantled in 1991 shortly
after the end of the Gulf War, may now be warranted,
especially if Bush is still laboring under the
impression that Saddam "tried to kill [his] dad".
While the ISG's 960-page report, known as the
Duelfer Report, does not address the assassination
attempt, its chronology and depiction of Saddam's world
view - adduced through lengthy interviews by one
Arabic-speaking FBI investigator and other interviews of
Saddam's closest advisers - make the notion that the
Iraqi dictator tried to kill Bush all the more
implausible.
For one thing, Saddam, according to
the report, was convinced that the CIA had thoroughly
penetrated his regime and thus would know not only that
he had dismantled his WMD (which the CIA apparently did
not), but also would know about his plans for important
intelligence operations. Under those circumstances, it
is hard to understand why he would then order an
assassination attempt on the former US president.
Even more interesting, according to the report,
was Saddam's "complicated" view of the United States.
While he derived "prestige" from being an enemy of the
US, he also considered it to be "equally prestigious for
him to be an ally of the United States - and regular
entreaties were made during the last decade to explore
this alternative".
Indeed, beginning already in
1991, according to the report, "very senior Iraqis close
to the president made proposals through intermediaries
for dialogue with Washington".
"Baghdad offered
flexibility on many issues, including offers to assist
in the Israel-Palestine conflict. Moreover, in informal
discussions, senior officials allowed that, if Iraq had
a security relationship with the United States, it might
be inclined to dispense with WMD programs and/or
ambitions," it added.
The report even concluded
that Iraq was willing to be Washington's "best friend in
the region bar none".
The fact that the US,
under Bush Sr and Clinton, did not show interest was
apparently a source of bewilderment to the Iraqi leader,
according to the Duelfer report. If Saddam had tried to
kill the ex-president, he probably would not have been
bewildered by Washington's lack of interest, but, by all
accounts, he was.
"From the report, Saddam seems
to be not a madman, but someone who would understand
very well the consequences of an assassination," noted
Gregory Thielmann, a former senior State Department
analyst who specialized in Iraq's WMD programs. "If his
top priority was getting the [UN economic] sanctions
lifted [as indicated by the report], then it doesn't
follow that he would try to kill the president of the
United States."
As portrayed by both the alleged
assassins and the Kuwaitis who grabbed them, the plot
was itself deeply amateurish, dependent on the
leadership of Wali Abdelhadi Ghazali; Raad Abdel-Amir
al-Assadi, from Najaf; and a dozen Iraqi whiskey
smugglers led by the owner of a coffee shop in Basra
that was a meeting place for cross-border smugglers.
Ghazali, who initially said he was approached
and supplied with explosives and cars by the the Iraqi
intelligence service, the Mukhabarat, was the only
person in the group who knew that Bush was the target.
Other defendants confessed to transporting explosives
across the border from Iraq but insisted they had no
idea what they were for.
Both Ghazali and Assadi
retracted their confessions during the trial, claiming
that they were extracted by repeated beatings. At the
time, Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International
expressed strong doubts that the trials could be fair,
noting that there had been credible reports of severe
beatings meted out to defendants accused of capital
crimes in Kuwait. Assadi insisted that he was asked by
the Mukhabarat to plant bombs around shopping centers in
Kuwait City.
US investigators, however, reported
that they believed the confessions were not coerced and
noted the similarity in the construction of the bombs
found with the Iraqis with one known to have been built
in Iraq in 1991.
In October 1993, however, New
Yorker investigative journalist Seymour Hersh assailed
the US government's case as "seriously flawed", noting
among other problems that seven bomb experts had told
him that the devices were mass-produced and probably not
even manufactured in Iraq.
Ambassador Joseph
Wilson, who met with Saddam when he served as US charge
d'affaires in Baghdad during the Gulf War, said he found
the plot "odd". Saddam "had to have had some idea that
his ability to run operations outside Iraq was not very
good, because we had foiled so many things before the
war. So you have to ask why someone who was a risk-taker
but clearly not suicidal would undertake to assassinate
a former president of the United States," Wilson pointed
out.
Larry Johnson, a top counter-terrorist
official at the State Department, said he still has "no
doubts" about the plot, recalling Saddam's "gangster"
ethic. "Personal honor was involved," he said.
