President Bush said lots of things about Saddam Hussein in the run-up to the Iraq War. But few of his charges grabbed more attention than an unscripted remark he made at a Texas political fund-raiser on Sept. 26, 2002. "After all, this is a guy who tried to kill my dad at one time," Bush said. The comment referred to a 1993 claim by the Kuwaiti government—accepted by the Clinton administration—that the Iraqi Intelligence Service (IIS) had plotted to assassinate President George H.W. Bush during a trip to Kuwait that spring. Ever since, armchair psychologists have suggested that personal revenge may have been one reason for the president's determination to overthrow Saddam's regime.
But curiously little has been heard about the allegedly foiled assassination plot in the five years since the U.S. military invaded Iraq. A just-released Pentagon study on the Iraqi regime's ties to terrorism only adds to the mystery. The review, conducted for the Pentagon's Joint Forces Command, combed through 600,000 pages of Iraqi intelligence documents seized after the fall of Baghdad, as well as thousands of hours of audio- and videotapes of Saddam's conversations with his ministers and top aides. The study found that the IIS kept remarkably detailed records of virtually every operation it planned, including plots to assassinate Iraqi exiles and to supply explosives and booby-trapped suitcases to Iraqi embassies. But the Pentagon researchers found no documents that referred to a plan to kill Bush. The absence was conspicuous because researchers, aware of its potential significance, were looking for such evidence. "It was surprising," said one source familiar with the preparation of the report (who under Pentagon ground rules was not permitted to speak on the record). Given how much the Iraqis did document, "you would have thought there would have been some veiled reference to something about [the plot]."
Now the Newsweek story goes on to say that the Bush assassination plot grew out of a Kuwaiti arrest "of a band of whiskey smugglers" on the Iraqi-Kuwaiti border. Kuwaiti authorities also found a Toyota Land Cruiser containing 175 pounds of explosives. The smuggler's ringleader, Wali al-Ghazali, confessed to the Kuwaitis that "he had been dispatched by an Iraqi intelligence agent to blow up former president Bush." Now I can't say whether al-Ghazali was planning to blow up former President Bush on his own, or under some type of orders by Iraqi intelligence or the military. Either way, a story came out to the Kuwaiti authorities, perhaps under torture, that these smugglers were planning on killing George H.W. Bush. And regardless of whether this story is authentic, or not, the Kuwaitis passed it on to American intelligence. The story became true simply because it was publicly released well after the First Gulf War, and when U.S. relations with Iraq were especially sour. Now going through the records of Iraqi intelligence, we find that the entire Iraqi assassination plot of George H.W. Bush was non-existent. It was false.
The real damage here is that the revelation of this Iraqi plot to kill the elder Bush may have been a motivating factor for his son to invade Iraq and depose Saddam Hussein for revenge. I'll admit that this is just pure speculation here, but I do find it interesting how the U.S. government continues to admit that Saddam had a hand in this assassination plot against the elder Bush. According to Newsweek:
A White House spokesman declined to comment, but a U.S. intelligence official said, "It remains our view that Saddam's government had a hand" in the 1993 plot, and that information since the war "lends further credence" to that view.
The Pentagon study also found no "smoking gun" connection between Iraq and al Qaeda, which was one of the principal claims that Bush administration made for invading Iraq. The report did find plenty of evidence that Saddam Hussein had close ties to Palestinian terrorist groups, of which the Bush administration is trying validate as a reason for continuing the U.S. war in Iraq in a sort of "word game" of associating other terrorist groups with al Qaeda, thus linking them to Iraq. So even as the Pentagon is showing that there is no evidence of Iraq's involvement in the Bush Senior assassination attempt, nor is there any evidence linking Iraq with al Qaeda, the Bush administration continues to support their failed U.S. war in Iraq with these lies.
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