Don’t Let Saddam Get Away With Murder

In the aftermath of yesterday’s much-publicized U.S. attack on a hardened communications bunker in Baghdad occupied at the time of the air strike by an undetermined number of civilians, the Center for Security Policy urged the Bush Administration to redouble its efforts to destroy the regime of Saddam Hussein and to eliminate its capacity to wage war against the Iraqi people, as well as those of other nations.

"Saddam Hussein’s depravity has plumbed new depths with the evident decision to make his own population ‘human shields’ against allied air attacks," Frank J. Gaffney, Jr., the Center’s director, said today. "Lacking sufficient numbers of coalition prisoners of war to lash to his military assets — in utter contempt for the Geneva Convention governing the treatment of POWs, the Butcher of Baghdad has apparently decided to ‘kill the ones he’s with,’ namely his own people."

The Center deplores the cunning calculation that has resulted in this recent loss of life among innocent non-combatants: Since Western publics abhor the wholesale maiming and murder typically associated with modern warfare; since allied commanders are determined to deny Saddam Hussein the opportunity to inflict such destruction on coalition forces; and since the bombing campaign’s skill, accuracy and tightly constrained rules of engagement has been such as to confine collateral casualties to a relatively small number, the Iraqi regime will simply move civilians into military targets.

The logic is as cynical as it brutal: Either way, Saddam Hussein wins. If associating civilians with military targets — be they command and control facilities, bridges, strategically significant factories — prevents such assets from being attacked, they will remain available for the war effort. Alternatively, if these assets are destroyed, and in the process non-combatants are wounded or killed, whether intentionally or not, there will be hell to pay in Western capitals, in an increasingly mischievously minded Kremlin and elsewhere in the Arab world.

In the Center’s view, such behavior simply adds a new item in the list of war crimes with which the Iraqi regime must be charged. It urges that the following guidance be applied in the aftermath of yesterday’s incident:

• The air campaign should not be slowed, curtailed or terminated. Indeed, it should be extended as long as necessary, certainly for a minimum of three-to-four weeks.

 

• Iraqi civilians should be advised through every means at our disposal that they are at risk if they are occupying facilities of the type being targeted by allied military forces.purposefully to attacks by Saddam Hussein’s Scuds, they have good reason to feel more secure in their own homes than would be the case in hardened bunkers. Unlike the Israeli and Saudi civilian populations now being subjected

 

• All occupants of the El Rashid Hotel should be notified immediately that Iraqi military facilities concealed by that structure will shortly be destroyed. While some Western journalists may be inconvenienced by this action, the United States should not be deterred from neutralizing the subterranean redoubt so concealed out of fear of an outbreak of what might be called the "Patty Hearst" syndrome — i.e., the possibility of Western journalists beginning to identify with the plight of their "captors."

 

• Finally, there should be no thought to a cease-fire that leaves Saddam Hussein in power and capable of engaging in this and similar crimes against humanity at will down the road. An op.ed. by Gaffney published in today’s Washington Times, concerning the enormous dangers of a cease-fire under present circumstances, is attached.