Former Israeli official recounts 1992 planning discussions with Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin to assassinate Saddam Hussein

also briefed Rabin after the election. At that stage, there was no discussion of whether we actually would, or should, target Saddam. I asked Misha, and then Yitzhak, only whether such an operation might seriously be considered by the government. If not, I said, we’d drop it. Both replied that we should go ahead with the planning and preparation. The November 1992 exercise was intended as a final test of its viability — before deciding whether actually to do it. A few weeks earlier, Rabin and I had talked through the arguments for and against. The arguments against it were obvious. Yes, in the past we had abducted, or even killed, leaders of groups involved in terror attacks. But we’d never contemplated targeting a head of state. Crossing that line risked being seen not just as attacking a dictator with a record of ruthlessness and murder at home, and aggression towards Israel, but long-accepted norms of international relations. The arguments in favour began with the fact that Saddam was a meglomaniacally ambitious dictator. He had also fired missiles on our towns and cities. He retained the capability to arm them with chemical warheads, possibly biological agents, and conceivably a nuclear warhead in the future. Both Rabin and I agreed there were two key tests of whether an attack would be justified: was it was the only realistic way of confronting the threat from Iraq, and would killing him end, or at least exponentially reduce, that threat. Though there was no final decision at our meeting, Rabin was clearly inclined to go ahead. An Israeli TV program two decades later unearthed a summary of the discussion, written by his military aide. “The Prime Minister approves the target... This is an operation we should go for when the probability of success is very high,” it said. “Thus, we have to build the operational capability in the best possible way, and continue preparations.” In another part of the record, Rabin is quoted as having defined the elimination of Saddam as a “meaningful objective” with implications for “the very security of Israel.” He added: “I do not see anyone similar to him in the Arab world.” I, too, was on balance persuaded we should do it. In the years since, I’ve sometime reflected on what happened with Saddam still in place: the 2003 invasion of Iraq, led by the younger President Bush, the tens of thousands of lives lost, the trillions of dollars spent on a war without any clear end, and the near-disintegration of Iraq. But with the complexities of Iraq then and now, there can be no simple answer to how the situation would have changed if we’d killed Saddam. Our view, based on detailed intelligence analyses, was that the likely result would have been a fairly rapid takeover by a few top security and Baath Party figures and that, while the new Iraqi leadership might try to retaliate 246 HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_028094