WASHINGTON: Senior intelligence experts inside and outside government have reached a consensus that Iraqi President Saddam Hussein would likely be ousted in a coup led by members of his inner circle in the final days or hours before US forces launch a major ground attack.
Faced with an imminent, overwhelming US assault and the choice of either being Saddam’s successors or being imprisoned or killed in the fighting, top-ranking officers or a group of military and other senior officials would take the chance to eliminate the Iraqi leader, several senior administration officials and intelligence experts said in recent interviews.
“Someone will take action and cause it to happen,” said one former high-ranking CIA officer with close ties to current thinking among intelligence officials.
It was unclear how widespread this view is within the administration. But with military preparations for a possible attack underway, senior officials, including Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, have recently spoken publicly about Iraqis eliminating Saddam, either through assassination or sending him into exile.
White House spokesman Ari Fleischer picked up the theme last week, encouraging a coup d’etat or assassination in answer to questions about the possible cost of a US-led invasion. “The cost of a one-way ticket is substantially less than (the cost of war),” Fleischer said. “The cost of one bullet, if the Iraqi people take it on themselves, is substantially less than that.”
“Saddam Hussein could decide that his future is limited and he’d like to leave,” Rumsfeld told the House Armed Services Committee. “Another way to do it would be to persuade enough people in Iraq the world would be a lot better world if that regime weren’t there and they decided to change the regime.”
The “silver bullet” approach — Iraqis eliminating Saddam on their own — has long been central to the CIA’s efforts to end the Iraqi leader’s dictatorship. Earlier this year, President Bush directed the CIA to undertake a comprehensive covert programme to topple the Iraqi leader, including authority to use lethal force.
It also included instructions to increase support and contacts with Iraqi opposition groups and forces outside and inside Iraq, and authorized expanded efforts to collect intelligence within the Iraqi government, military and intelligence service where pockets of anti-Saddam sentiment have been detected.
The Washington Post reported in June that CIA Director George Tenet briefed Bush and senior Cabinet members that the newly authorized covert plan had only a small chance of working if it were not accompanied by outside military action, or at least by convincing the Iraqis that overwhelming military action was imminent.
Iraqi officers, who over the years have watched Saddam have his own sons-in-law shot for temporarily defecting and the brutal elimination of senior colleagues based on rumours that they were disloyal, “will have to be certain the Americans are coming with overwhelming force before they move,” said one top government analyst. “They have been hurt before.”
A former senior Clinton administration official agreed with this assessment, citing a failed CIA attempt employing Iraqi senior officers to eliminate Saddam in 1996. “It always has been the view of intelligence community that there was a low chance of success in the absence of the sound of (military) footsteps in Baghdad,” the official said.
Several officials said one reason for their view that the inner-circle in Baghdad would move against Saddam is the Bush administration’s vocal and seemingly determined planning to launch a war with a goal not just of eliminating Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction, but also of changing the country’s leadership. Senior defence and intelligence officials have spoken openly of their conviction that many Iraqi military units would not defend Saddam in event of a US attack, or could be convinced not to do so.
The assessment that a coup in Baghdad would be possible, if not probable, may have helped shape some of the administration’s thinking about planning for a post-Saddam Iraq.
It has led many CIA and State Department officials, for example, to oppose recognition of the leaders of prominent Iraqi exile groups as a government-in exile, arguing that they would never be accepted to head any new Baghdad government. “The exiles would be seen as a US quisling government,” one senior analyst said, referring to the Norwegian who betrayed his country to the Nazis in World War-II and then headed the government under Fascist occupation.
Although US officials have talked of instituting a democratic government in Baghdad, many intelligence officials believe a military-led coup could help keep Iraq together and avoid moves toward separation that could come from its three major ethnic groups, the Shia majority, Kurdish groups of the north and the Sunni minority that has dominated the country in recent times. A coup would leave many of Iraq’s upper and middle-level bureaucrats in place, limiting the need for major rebuilding of the government, according to the intelligence community’s thinking.
Since the late 1990s, one of several clandestine Iraq operations the CIA has underway is to identify key officials around Saddam and find ways to contact them, mostly through intermediaries. The object is to plant the seeds for an eventual coup or possible assassination, according to current and former US officials. Promises of future power or wealth are among the rewards dangled in front of the Iraqis, sources said.
Exiled Iraqi officers and political figures are being used by US intelligence to keep in touch with former colleagues and there are continuing efforts, mostly unsuccessful, to approach and perhaps recruit Iraqis who travel outside the country, officials said.
Saddam is not unaware of these activities and has regularly shaken up his top officer corps and others with access to him, including those in his security force.
Saddam’s closest aides are often the only ones to see him and he constantly is on the move, sources said. His public appearances are rarely announced ahead of time and it is well publicized that he almost never sleeps in the same bed two nights in a row.
One of the more curious nuances in the administration’s public pronouncements in recent weeks is the idea of Saddam and his family and advisers being sent into exile.—Dawn/The Washington Post News Service.