The operation was a success but the white man who received the new heart lived only for 18 days. The doctors who performed the operation were not able to save him, as the medicine that helps a body to accept a foreign organ was not available in those days.

I remembered this incident while I was following up a joint press conference of Israeli Foreign Minister Shimon Peres with his Egyptian counterpart Ahmed Maher in Cairo recently. Peres was apparently slow and skeptical while answering questions as he did not want to say that his bloodthirsty prime minister has any clear peace plan.

Those who saw that press conference might have noticed that Peres had a strong feeling that his presence was unwanted and that his colonialist state was an intruder in the region. The Arab body has rejected Israel like the body of the white man that rejected the heart of the African youth.

While talking about the peace plan, Peres intentionally ignored the Saudi-initiated Arab peace plan, although the questions raised by reporters on the issue were very clear. He insisted that his country would accept the American peace plan, which is still a political mystery. Then he started talking about democracy, thinking that there are people who believe that the military government in Israel is democratic and is an example to follow. Israel’s rejection of the Arab peace proposal will be a big mistake and will certainly be missing a golden opportunity.

After several years, medical scientists found a medicine that will enable a human body to accommodate a foreign organ, on condition that a person take it for the rest of his life. Such is the condition of Israel, which always needs the unqualified support of the United States because of its presence in the Arab world. But one thing they should bear in mind is that the American tablet is dependent upon Washington’s strategic interests in the region.

On the other hand, the Arab peace plan is the best one as it allows Israel to remain in the region as a secure country in the region. The Arab peace plan calls for total Israeli withdrawal from Arab land, dismantling of Jewish settlements in Arab territory and recognition of Palestinian rights, including the right to establish an independent state. In return, all Arab countries will recognize Israel and its existence within its internationally recognized borders. They will also cooperate with Israel in all areas as part of normalization.

All other peace proposals are temporary solutions. They will not help achieve peace. They will only help give Israel more time to grab more Arab territories and prevent the establishment of a sovereign Palestinian state.

The presence of the butcher Sharon in power will not help peace. The Israeli policies of terrorism, destruction of houses and farms and massacre of civilians will not succeed. A country established on racism, religious bias and force will not remain long among countries and societies known for their great history, noble descent and honorable lineage.

Not only did it appear to knock the shine off Jimmy Carter’s Nobel Peace Prize, since his greatest achievement, apart from Camp David, was his successful diplomacy that brokered the 1994 freeze on the country’s nuclear-bomb making, it appeared it might well open the doors again to those Republicans who eight years ago were arguing for the US to bomb North Korea.

A strange thing appears to have happened in those eight years. For all the bluster with President George Bush’s notion of an "Axis of Evil", no longer is the talk this wild. The accent is all on diplomacy and an emphasizing of what is still apparently being honored in the old 1994 agreement, the freezing of plutonium production, the most potent raw material for nuclear bomb manufacture.

Eight years ago, Brent Scowcroft, the former National Security Advisor to president George Bush Sr. (and now the dove on going to war with Iraq) said that President Bill Clinton would be making a terrible mistake if the US did not immediately bomb the North Korean reprocessing plant before the cooling rods containing plutonium, sufficient to make half a dozen nuclear weapons, could be transferred to it.

In the end, Carter was able to pull off his remarkable diplomacy because Clinton feared the consequences of war. The Pentagon told him that the US could lose 50,000 troops. Also that it was possible that North Korea already had in its arsenal two or three nuclear weapons and that if the regime thought it might lose the war it would use these.

Nothing has really changed in the interim to alter the dangers of going to war. The US many times broke its side of the bargain. At various times a Republican-dominated Congress made it impossible for the administration to deliver on various parts of the US side of the bargain, in particular the ending of the trade embargo. And now the North has broken in the most blatant manner possible an important element in the nuclear freeze, (although it should be stressed it doesn’t appear to have actually gone into nuclear bomb production).

The war option is no more viable than it was eight years ago. It comes as no surprise that Japan, the country, apart from South Korea, that has the most to fear from North Korea’s nuclear armament and missile programs, is arguing that the 1994 agreement needs to be revitalized not abandoned. And perhaps indeed the North Korean admission of its clandestine activity is more a cry for openness and creative diplomacy than a new threat to deliver nuclear annihilation.

Here in Taiwan there is a sense of wait and see. Taiwan is used to living under threat. The antagonist it faces across the Taiwan Strait is far larger, better armed and in every way more formidable than North Korea. It is five years since the last blow up in this delicate relationship. Angry at Taiwan’s attempt to break out of its diplomatic isolation with a quasi-official visit of Taiwan’s president to America China "test-fired" missiles in the Taiwan Strait, only to be met by a dramatic show of US naval strength in the same waters. But since then, and particularly with the electoral victory of the longtime opposition, the Democratic Progressive Party, the relationship has quietened.

It may not be harmony and it is still subject to sudden flare-ups, as when President Chen Shui-bian in August spoke of there being "one country on each side" of the Strait. But each crisis seems to occur at more distant intervals and the wind goes out of them quicker each time.

There are some here who argue that Taiwan is being slowly throttled by the Chinese diplomatic embargo, but it’s hard to believe that when the Taiwanese economic presence in the mainland is growing by leaps and bounds and China is becoming increasingly reliant on Taiwanese high-tech expertise and when Chinese tourists in droves can be seen milling around the Chinese art treasures in the National Palace Museum.

There is the occasional voice in the legislature arguing for Taiwan to develop its own nuclear weapons so that China would no longer dare intimidate the island. And there are those, like Vice President Annette Lu who, in an interview with me, try to fudge the one-China issue by saying "We are one Chinese". All such voices tend to have somewhere at the back of their mind an independent Taiwan as their goal.

But this will never work out. China is too vast and too powerful to be deflected from its goal of a unified China (which the US formally supports) — even if Taiwan started to build nuclear weapons. Indeed, that would provoke China to move pre-emptively.

The issue is more subtle: how to make sure China respects the individuality and personality of Taiwan. This means above all respect for Taiwan’s democracy, rule of law and total autonomy in domestic affairs- not like Hong Kong where since re-union some important principles have been undermined, not least the commitment to proceed to democracy.

The main goal for Taiwan must be the same goal as in America’s dealing with North Korea — the avoidance of war. There is no point in standing up for human rights and benign principles if the method chosen is so antagonistic it leads to war. War is the worst of all human wrongs and as it runs its course every human right in the book is smashed to pieces.

As with North Korea, engagement rather than confrontation is the path to take.

Exactly 40 years ago, at 7 p.m. on Monday, Oct. 22 1962, President Kennedy went on television to reveal the existence of Soviet missile bases in Cuba, 90 miles from the southernmost territory of Florida, and announced he was imposing a "quarantine" or blockade of the island. Nikita Khrushchev immediately denounced the US action as "piracy". With Soviet ships sailing toward the blockade, nuclear war seemed possible, if not probable.

Today, both supporters and opponents of military action against Saddam use Kennedy’s handling of the Cuban missile crisis to bolster their cause. Bush has donned the JFK mantle by quoting from his 1962 address, and its warning that the world could not tolerate "deliberate deception and offensive threats on the part of any nation great or small". No longer, said Bush/ Kennedy, did only "the actual firing of weapons represent a sufficient challenge to a nation’s security to constitute maximum peril".

But Ted Kennedy, an opponent of a pre-emptive strike, has drawn the opposite lesson. To support his argument that a strike against Iraq now would be "unilateralism run amok", he recalled his brother Robert’s comment 40 years ago that an attack on Cuba would be a "Pearl Harbor in reverse".

In fact, both sides distort history. Ted Kennedy conveniently forgets that his brother did launch a pre-emptive strike against Cuba, in May 1961. It was called the Bay of Pigs and was a total fiasco. But the greater distortion is Bush’s.

Cuba then and Iraq now are basically incompatible. Yes, there are a few similarities. Like JFK, Bush is a newish President with many doubters. They both had an eye on approaching mid-term elections. Partly as a result of Kennedy’s resolution of the missile crisis, his Democrats made gains in those elections. Bush hopes the same will happen in 2002.

But what threat? The Cuban crisis was a genuine time of fear. The adversary was the rival superpower, and Kennedy told his countrymen that America would not shrink from the risk of "worldwide nuclear war" to force the removal of the missiles. I was a schoolboy then, and remember a master talking about an event planned the next week — "if there is a next week".

Compare and contrast the situation now. The opponent is Saddam Hussein, leader of a ramshackle, pariah country 6,000 miles from the US. The danger he poses is that he might have a nuclear weapon a year or two hence. Even if he developed one, he could not hit the US with it. And however erratic Saddam’s career, one constant is his aversion to self-immolation.

Yes, he is an irritant, whose thwarting of the United Nations and general durability drives the Bush-Cheney-Rumsfeld crowd mad. His record is indisputably appalling, and the world, not to mention his long-suffering country, would be better off without him.

But as a threat to US national security, Saddam hardly rates; as a menace to the American way of life, he is not a patch on the Washington sniper. Back in 1962, Kennedy’s stand against the Soviet Union had broad international support. Bush’s militaristic designs on Iraq, by contrast have little backing beyond Britain.

Many personal roles too are reversed this time around. In 1962 the generals were urging Kennedy to invade and dare Khrushchev to respond; this time the Pentagon’s uniformed commanders counsel caution, to the annoyance of their civilian bosses. Having served in World War II, Kennedy understood the horrors of conflict; the Bush who seems so eager to unleash the US military against Iraq spent the Vietnam years in the Texas National Guard.

But for all the differences, Kennedy’s handling of the Cuban crisis offers lessons today. His aides remember his constant looking ahead, the questions about the impact of a particular decision, the "what happens if". Kennedy’s adviser and speechwriter Ted Sorensen warned against "actions that history could neither understand nor forget", and his president took the advice to heart.

Like Kennedy, Bush faces an eternal dilemma. "If you want peace, prepare for war", runs the old Roman dictum. Just as in 1962 against the Soviet Union, the threat of force is essential now to secure the desired peaceful outcome, in this case of persuading Saddam to disarm.

Kennedy faithfully applied the immortal rule of negotiating laid down by Ernest Bevin, which applies as much to international negotiation as to the trade union bargaining at which Attlee’s great foreign secretary also excelled: "The first thing to decide before you walk into any negotiation is what to do if the other chap says ‘no’." Obviously Bevin’s maxim does not apply with Iraq. The entire world agrees there is nothing to negotiate with Saddam Hussein. Rather, has Bush thought ahead to what happens when the other chap isn’t there any more? It is then that the Iraq crisis, in a very different way, could become as risky as the Cuban missile crisis 40 years ago. (The Independent)

  Blair’s cheerleading, Chirac’s criticism taming Bush, so far
By Hugo Young

LONDON — The prospect of war over Iraq has grown a bit more distant, thanks to the opposite stances taken by two national leaders. Tony Blair and Jacques Chirac have each made vibrant contributions. There is no European foreign policy; in fact there are three or four different Iraq positions among EU member states. But Blair and Chirac have achieved a synthesis of influence. Had they been colluding, which has been only intermittently the case, we could call this the soft-cop hard-cop routine. It may well come to nothing, in face of the resistance of the third leader, George Bush. But the British way and the French way have parallel, not contradictory, importance.

Blair is the soft and faithful ally. It becomes clearer why he finds Bush easier to deal with than his old soulmate, Bill Clinton. This claim sounded weird, when it first seeped out of Downing Street. But the moral simplicities Bush applies to the state of the world are like our leader’s own. Whereas Clinton was sinuous and ambivalent — in other words, a realist — Bush is as bold as Blair in the lines he draws between good and evil states, and in his righteous determination to move against the evil ones. Not only is Saddam Hussein atrociously evil, today’s Anglos and Americans agree he must be destroyed.

For Blair this is a calculated as well as instinctive position. His mantra is: Show total fidelity to Washington in public, or sacrifice all influence there in public and in private. For the last year he has excelled himself, delivering onslaughts against Saddam, and making brazenly unproven claims of linkage between Iraq and Al-Qaeda terrorism, with more fluency and power than Bush can ever find. No enemies on the right — that has been Blair’s watchword in this matter, even though he’s praying that the solutions of the hard right, the unilateralist Pentagon right, are never ventured.

So far, though, he has not wasted his opportunities to avert this. That’s to his credit. It makes the case for his public cheerleading. Ever since Bush came in, he has had a twin-track strategy, to be supportive in general, but resistant in particular.

If it hadn’t been for Blair, Bush would never have agreed to the NATO-Russia Council, which was put together over the near-dead body of Donald Rumsfeld. If it hadn’t been for Blair, it’s doubtful whether Bush would have begun to understand the importance of having a strand of nation-building — thin and cheap, but not yet abandoned — in his policy for Afghanistan. And it’s certain that Blair supplied a crucial push at the right time, early in September, that took Bush to the UN and deepened presidential awareness that the cost of ignoring the international community would probably be to make an Iraq war self-destructive.

Without that, we would not be where we are today, listening to a seismic UN Security Council wrangle over the words of an anti-Iraq resolution. All EU governments whose opinion I’ve been able to gather agree that Blair has played a crucial role here.

Far from sneering at his relationship with Bush, they privately see it as the last best hope for sanity. They wholly welcome the fact that one European voice gets a hearing in Washington. Which is where the French come in.

Unless Blair had helped open the door, France would have had no opportunity to start rearranging the international house. Chirac, emboldened by his new strength at home, became the critical figure, more so than Russia and certainly more than China, in taming the American demand for a UN carte blanche for war. This is a Gaullist assertion of French importance, but also a serious attempt to refine the international order as Bush and the Pentagon would like to shape it.

Washington has proved somewhat amenable to Chirac as well as Blair. We see that public fealty is not the only route to influence. Each nation to its history and tradition. The final text is still unagreed, but clearly will not include the automatic resort to force, in the event of Saddam blocking the inspectors, that Washington first demanded. As long as France, having enraged the Americans with her nit-picking, knows when to quit arguing, the episode will go down as a major success for French diplomacy. It may be true, as Jack Straw keeps saying, that Iraq would not have budged on inspectors without the threat of war. But it’s also true that a UN, rather than purely US, outcome will essentially be the result of French persistence, as a result of which the world may be marginally safer.

That depends on what happens. Internationalism, aka the UN, remains at risk from two eventualities. The US might still wreck the UN by treating the inspection process with cynicism, and insisting on its right to attack Iraq anyway: Its spokesmen never fail to hint at this possibility, with Straw chorusing alongside. Equally, the UN could wreck itself by continuing, even in the face of Iraqi obstruction, to resist the military response that is at least implicit in the compromise for which France has been pressing. Each side, the Anglo-Americans and Arabic-Europeans, has to tread a delicate line. There is not a one-way street to disaster accessible by the Americans alone.

Where the parallelism between Blair and Chirac breaks down, however, is in the event of their shared objective failing. If Bush decides to attack without UN approval, the damage caused to Britain will be more telling than the anger aroused in Chirac and the French. It would present Blair with the worst domestic political crisis of his prime ministership. He would have been driven helplessly toward a war another leader had determined to start, the morality of which was lost on much of his own party and perhaps a majority of the British people but he himself had come wholly to believe in. Chirac, by contrast, would be laughing all the way to the bank where oil, trade and the affection of the Arab world are stored.

Both leaders have proved that Washington can be influenced for good; and Washington, to its credit, has judged, contrary to the instincts of Vice President Cheney and the loudest Pentagon civilians, that the spectacle of making some concessions can do it no harm. Domestic American politics, which is anti-terrorism but not all pro-war, is pushing the White House to appear more reasonable. To that extent, it seems to have climbed down.

But Blair has every reason to fear Bush climbing back up again. However compliant his rhetoric, the prime minister knows as well as anyone that attacking Iraq is more likely to increase than diminish the threat from Al-Qaeda. He talks a moral game, but is aware of the political costs it will entail when he loses control of it. He would intensely prefer Iraq not to happen, at least not yet. So would Chirac. The difference is that Chirac can afford to make that clear, whereas Blair has left no retreat from participating in an all-out invasion that could lead to several catastrophes. (The Guardian)

‘We have the authority to assassinate people before they can assassinate us’

Ed Blanche
Special to The Daily Star

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.
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.