Friday, February 27, 2004

Iraq War: An historical footnote

Those who followed the buildup to the Iraq War may remember an incident from 1993 that was often mentioned as the last known terrorist incident sponsored by Iraq and directed specifically at Americans. Gerald Posner in Why America Slept (2003) describes it this way:

On April 10, 1993, agents of the Iraqi Intelligence Service handed the keys of a Toyota Land Cruiser that was packed with plastic explosives to a specially recruited team. On April 13, under cover of darkness, these operatives began a secret trek across the southern Iraqi desert toward the Kuwaiti frontier. Their target was the just retired ex-president, George Bush, who was arriving with his family in Kuwait for a triumphant tour of the liberated land. On the day Bush was due to arrive, the Kuwaitis intercepted the explosive-laden Land Cruiser and rounded up the conspirators.

After the FBI and the CIA investigated the evidence, they convinced President Clinton that the plot was indeed aimed at Bush. As retaliation, Clinton ordered 23 cruise missiles fired at an Iraqi intelligence complex in Baghdad.

I was reminded of that incident when I read the following sentence in Israeli historian Benny Morris' Righteous Victims (1999): "In 1992 the IDF [Israeli Defense Force] reportedly began planning a commando raid aiming to assassinate Saddam, but it was aborted when, during a dress rehersal, a missile accidentally killed six men."

It would be interesting to know if Iraq got wind of that Israeli plan, and if that played a role in the planned attempt on George H.W. Bush's life.

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