HOME / foreigners: Opinions about events beyond our borders.

Should We Assassinate Saddam?

By Anne ApplebaumPosted Monday, Feb. 19, 2001, at 11:30 PM ET

Illustration by Mark Alan Stamaty Hands up anyone who remembers the first scene in Air Force One, the film in which Harrison Ford plays the American president as action hero: The opening credits roll, parachutes open up, American paratroopers swoop down. With their laser-guided guns and super high-tech night goggles, they knock the snipers off the roof of the residence of Gen. Ivan Radek, the bad-guy leader of a mythical Kazakhstan, a rogue state whose post-Soviet nukes threaten the West. Then they storm through the building, drag the general from his bed, and whisk him away in a helicopter to meet his fate at the hand of international justice.

RSS

But is this scene mere Hollywood fantasy? Or could it herald the future of NATO? Officially, the answer is no: In the wake of the umpteen failed attempts to assassinate Fidel Castro and others, custom and habit, not to mention the law (several executive orders from the 1970s and 1980s) now prohibit American presidents from authorizing assassinations of foreign leaders. In practice, of course, they've tried anyway, but usually by the ineffective means of aerial bombing raids. Ronald Reagan once had a go at Muammar Qaddafi, bombarding his house during an attack on Tripoli. In the course of Desert Storm, allied forces targeted Saddam Hussein's presidential palaces, just as NATO didn't shy away from aiming at places where Slobodan Milosevic might conceivably be hiding during the bombing of Belgrade.

Aerial bombing is inefficient, however, and rarely successful. And although everyone responsible for policy will hotly deny that anyone has ever attempted assassination of anybody in Serbia or Iraq, it is becoming clear that in the wake of Kosovo—and in light of the continued threats posed by Saddam Hussein—the thought of trying to target terrorist dictators with greater precision has begun to enter the heads of some NATO planners. The argument goes like this: Wars in both Kosovo and Iraq have been extremely expensive, costing huge amounts of money and thousands of lives. If new technology—say, hit teams with access to satellite-tracking technology—could make assassinations easier, faster, and more likely to succeed than the exploding cigars we used to send to Castro, shouldn't we try that instead? Last Friday's renewed bombing of Iraq was a perfect illustration of the sort of military action nobody really likes taking. It makes America look aggressive, it angers the unconsulted NATO allies, it inflames the Russians and the Chinese, it doesn't solve the problem. How much more efficient it would be to send in an Air Force One-style hit squad, eliminate Saddam Hussein—and eliminate the source of the conflict for good.

As I say, it is my understanding that this sort of thing has been discussed, not that it is already in the actual planning stages. Nevertheless, rumors are percolating around my part of the world and are powerful enough to make some people nervous. Last week, the Washington Times printed an article describing legislation (click here to read the bill in Adobe Acrobat format) recently introduced by Georgia Rep. Bob Barr that would restore the American president's license to assassinate foreign leaders. Although the bill has no co-sponsors, and although Barr himself is quoted saying he has "no idea" whether the legislation will win approval, the mere appearance of the article was enough to cause a flurry of panic in Belarus, whose dictatorial president, Alexander Lukashenko, apparently assumed he would be the first target. The head of the foreign affairs committee of the Belarus parliament pompously complained on television that such a law "testifies to the loss not only of political sensibility, but also to all human feeling."

Assassination attempts on Lukashenko strike me as highly unlikely—alas for the poor Belarussians, they are not strategically important enough to merit such lavish attention. Nevertheless, I note, for the record, that at least one mysterious assassination has occurred in recent memory, not so very far from Minsk. Just before the Russian presidential elections of 1996, the then Chechen rebel leader, Dzhokhar Dudayev, was killed by a laser-guided Russian missile, apparently while talking on a mobile telephone. Here I concede that I really am reporting completely unsubstantiated rumor; nevertheless, I note, for the record, that on two occasions Chechen leaders visiting the West angrily told me that the American government had used its satellites to pinpoint the exact location of Dudayev, or rather his telephone, as a favor to Boris Yeltsin in the run-up to the election campaign. (And not only Chechens think so; click here for the full conspiracy theory.)

True or false, the Dudayev rumor also illustrates the most important drawback of open assassination attempts: Even if they succeed—and in the world outside of Hollywood, one suspects they often wouldn't—they don't necessarily win you friends and influence among the people whose leader you have eliminated. Again, NATO might have saved vast sums of money and many lives by assassinating Slobodan Milosevic in the early 1990s, perhaps ending the war in Bosnia and preventing the war in Kosovo. NATO might also have so inflamed the Serbs that someone even worse might have come to power. In the end, the Serbs deposed Milosevic themselves, perhaps laying the ground for a peaceful, democratic, stable Serbia, which may one day even be a member of NATO.

Waiting for that change required a great deal of Western patience. Because patience is wearing out elsewhere—particularly in Iraq—prepare yourself now for the possible use of "other methods."

E-MAIL

RECOMMEND... Get Slate RSS Feeds

Anne Applebaum is a Washington Post and Slate columnist. Her most recent book is Gulag: A History.

COMMENTS

Reader Comments From The Fray:

[Notes from the Fray Editor: The first message below was part of a really excellent thread—certainly the best thread we have seen built on a post called "Your Demented Article". The ever-interesting "suppose you could have killed Hitler" argument gets a going-over here. And Martin knows why the Queen of England has several residences…]

As a nation, the United States has a right to promote its interests when dealing with other nations. It is no surprise to those who follow the news, that this country does push its weight around on the world scene. At the same time, this nation tries to portray itself with the image of the good guy, but generally succeeds only in looking ugly and self-centered. One prominent exception to this is worldwide disaster relief. On the other hand, take trade. We routinely interdict the importation of a major cash crop of South American and some Middle Eastern countries, while at the same time we force other nations to import addictive drugs grown in our southern states. Interdict isn't so bad, but interfering with the local production of their crops is. (The cash crops are coca leaves, hemp, and poppies--which convert into things like coke, crack, pot, morphine, heroin, etc. The American drug is tobacco.) Stemming the inflow of dangerous drugs is in our national interest, and even if we are intimidating other nations, we're not barging in without their permission

Assassination, though, isn't done with the permission of the government of the other nation involved. Perhaps if there was a "Government of Iraq in exile" that could give plausible legality to an attempt to assassinate Saddam (and to put the exile government "back" in power, we could do in Iraq what we did to Iran in 1953 (except we didn't assassinate the Iranian Premier)--and perhaps reap the same sort of reward in a few decades.

--Joann Prinzivalli

(To reply, click here.)

As a former member of the U.S. Army who spent a year in Bosnia during the "Hunt for Milosevic." I can honestly say that when you destroy the leader of a country he will be a hero even if he was a tyrant. The painful truth of assassinating a political leader is no matter how bad he is you allow his followers to make him "A man of the people who died for the people." The ironic thing about the whole Saddam issue is Bush I. had a great opportunity to rid the world of him during the Gulf War and did nothing to remove his fangs. The people wanted to rid themselves of Saddam and instead U.S. troops were pulled out of the Gulf instead of marching forward.

--Phillip Armstrong

(To reply, click here.)

As a practical matter--with the virtually unlimited resources at the disposal of the U.S., the opportunity to plan carefully and the development of the skills needed--just about anyone could be killed. The failure of plots against Castro's life were mainly a function of the lack of skill and experience at such skullduggery within the black operations segments of American intelligence services.

However as a policy matter, assassination would be appalling, even if the target were as despicable as Saddam. There is no guarantee that lopping off the head would end the regime; it's naive to assume so. It's a surefire way of making the most reprehensible characters into martyrs, at least for some of their people, when we should aim to drive wedges between regimes and people. And, it's an invitation to retaliate by assassination of the best target the other side can get at--which may be an ambassador or just uninvolved passersby in a terror attack. Finally, and no small matter, it's an act of war and one must be prepared to fight the war--so there may be no avoiding the kind of military action that one presumably wishes to avoid by resort to the more "surgical" strike at the head honcho

--Publius

(To reply, click here.)

Because the U.S. has some moral authority and lots of might, our military actions lead to retaliation in kind, not escalation. As long as we're dropping bombs on smaller nations very far away, we can be comfortable at home, since they don't have the capacity to bomb us. Assassination is another story. Our leaders are much, much more vulnerable to assassination than Saddam Hussein or Castro. Anyone can enter our country, and for that matter stroll past the White House holding anything small enough to carry. Our leaders have known addresses and published schedules, and if our enemies will settle for a Senator or ten, they don't even have to worry about bodyguards. Whether or not our assassination attempt is successful, retaliation in kind will be unstoppable. We are wise not to start a kind of war where our enemies have all the advantages.

--History Guy

(To reply, click here.)

(2/22)

What did you think of this article?

Join The Fray: Our Reader Discussion Forum

POST A MESSAGE | READ MESSAGES