A GQ-type CD: What's the evidence Saddam tried to assassinate Bush 1.0?

[RickJay]

It is frequently asserted that Saddam Hussein attempted to have George H. Bush assassinated. I confess that I just started noticing this claim about 2-3 years ago, and if there was ever actually an attempt on President G.H. Bush’s life, I missed the CNN coverage.

Since so many other claims about Iraq have turned out to be figments of Ahmed Chalabi’s imagination… what is the evidence that this attempted assassination actually took place or was actually in the works?

[Brutus]

1993, not ‘2 or 3’ years ago.

…Clinton relied heavily on evidence found by FBI bomb experts linking the Iraqi Intelligence Service to a 175-pound car bomb found April 14 in Kuwait City.

[XT]

I suppose its possible Clinton did make it all up. Do you have any evidence that he did, RickJay? Or were you under the impression this was coming from the Republicans or Chalabi’?

-XT

[Marley23]

@Brutus

1993, not ‘2 or 3’ years ago.

He said he first heard about it two or three years ago, not that it happened then.

[elucidator]

Seymour Hersch, the New Yorker reporter, did a very impressive article on just that issue for the same magazine. Highly recommended. His final conclusion, IIRC, was that in all probability, the whole thing was cooked up by Kuwaiti intelligence, hoping to heat up things between the US and Saddam.

[Desmostylus]

Link to the story referred to by elucidator:

A Case Not Closed
by Seymour M. Hersh

The Post article named Berger and two other high-level Clinton Administration officials—R. James Woolsey, the director of the Central Intelligence Agency, and Frank G. Wisner, now an Under-Secretary of Defense—as being among those who advocated “direct retribution” against Iraq. By this time, too, Martin Indyk was hard at work, telling selected journalists, “We’ve got it”—that is, highly reliable intelligence tying Iraq to a plot against Bush. Indyk also said that Saudi Arabia, which had been the most important American and Kuwaiti ally in the Gulf War, was pressuring the Administration to take harsh action. The Saudi argument to the Clinton Administration, as it was relayed by Indyk, was that “if people think they can get away with this, you’ll have no credibility” in the Middle East.

A significant factor in the campaign against Saddam Hussein was simple animosity, stemming from the Iraqi leader’s occupation of Kuwait in August of 1990 and his near-suicidal defiance of American pressure, which resulted in the brutal and disastrous Gulf War in early 1991. A former American ambassador in the Middle East recalled his surprise when a colleague, who holds a high post in the Clinton Administration, told him that he had started arguing for retaliation on the day after the first reports of an assassination attempt reached Washington from Kuwait. “I was shocked, because I view him as a normally very responsible and sober person, who understands about power and how to use it,” the former ambassador said. “He just hates Saddam—a visceral hatred.” Another former senior official said that many officials in the Pentagon and the State Department had become increasingly angry with Iraq in the early months of the Clinton Administration, feeling that Saddam Hussein had been “getting away with things” because of Washington’s preoccupation with events in the former Yugoslavia.

Basically, it was bogus info fed by Kuwait to a bunch of neo-con idiots like Woolsey in Washington.

[Revtim]

So maybe Kuwait tricked Clinton into attacking Iraq, and maybe Iran tricked W. Bush into invading it.

Yow. Seems pretty

[RickJay]

@xtisme

I suppose its possible Clinton did make it all up. Do you have any evidence that he did, RickJay? Or were you under the impression this was coming from the Republicans or Chalabi’?

What the heck are you talking about?

I asked for the facts of the case. How hard a question is that? Christ.

Desmostylus, thanks for actually answering my question. Does anyone have some less-critical cites, though? I’d like more facts from more sources.

[Desmostylus]

@RickJay

Desmostylus, thanks for actually answering my question. Does anyone have some less-critical cites, though? I’d like more facts from more sources.

Read Hersh’s story, don’t just go on my two paragraph clip from it, or my one sentence summary. Hersh cites mulitple sources, and gives the dates of the stories in the New York Times, Washington Post and Wall Street Journal (though it may be hard to locate those online free of cost).

If you want more than that, you might try a FOI query with the FBI or CIA. Good luck with that.