CIA CHIEF: U.S. SPARED SADDAM BECAUSE LOCATING HIM DOUBTFUL

                         Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: SATURDAY, January 9, 1993                   TAG: 9301090234
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL                    PAGE: A2   EDITION: METRO  
SOURCE: Los Angeles Times
DATELINE: WASHINGTON                                LENGTH: Medium
CIA CHIEF: U.S. SPARED SADDAM BECAUSE LOCATING HIM DOUBTFUL
CIA Director Robert Gates has provided a new, detailed account of one of the most historically significant and controversial actions of the Bush administration: the decision to leave Saddam Hussein in power at the end of the Persian Gulf War.
In an interview this week, Gates, who was deputy national security adviser at the White House before and during the war against Iraq, acknowledged that administration officials talked extensively about the possibility of making Saddam's capture one of America's war aims.
In the end, Gates said, U.S. officials rejected the idea, largely because they feared the Iraqi leader would go into hiding, as Panamanian strongman Manuel Noriega had done during the 1989 U.S. military intervention in Panama, and that U.S. troops occupying Iraq would be unable to find him.
In the nearly two years since the end of hostilities in Operation Desert Storm, President Bush, who once branded Saddam as "worse than Hitler," has had to live with some of the unhappy consequences - politically and for American foreign policy - of Saddam's continued hold on power.
During last year's presidential campaign, President-elect Clinton and Ross Perot cited Saddam's continuing presence in Baghdad to diminish the luster of Bush's victory in the Gulf War. Even now, in the final days of his presidency, Bush finds himself grappling with some of the continuing challenges and gestures of defiance by the Iraqi leader, whose forces were challenging U.S. warplanes in the U.N. Gates "no-fly zone" over southern Iraq.
At the time of the war, Gates said, most top-level U.S. officials in discussions about Saddam remembered their frustration in Panama.
"You were dealing with some [administration officials] who had some experience in trying to find the leader of a country where the U.S. military had taken action, in Panama," Gates said. "And I don't know how long it would have been before we found Noriega, if he hadn't turned himself in to the Papal Legate."
After the invasion of Panama on Dec. 20, 1989, Noriega vanished, prompting American officials to offer a $1 million reward for information leading to his capture. Four days later, Noriega sought asylum with the Papal Legate - the Vatican's diplomatic mission - in Panama City, and after another 10 days, he surrendered to U.S. authorities.
"We were all a little shaped by that experience, and Iraq's a hell of a lot bigger country than Panama and we knew a lot less about it than we did Panama," said Gates. "I think there was a general feeling that it would not be difficult for Saddam to flee Baghdad and it would be very difficult for us to try and find him. So you'd end up potentially occupying much of Iraq and then having to deal with the consequences of that."
In the past, military leaders such as Gen. Colin Powell, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and Gen. Norman Schwarzkopf, the Gulf War commander, have said it would have been difficult for U.S. troops to catch Saddam if he had fled Baghdad and gone into hiding.
But the official explanations have focused largely on three factors:
American troops would take more casualties in an extended drive on Baghdad.
The Bush administration believed Saddam would soon be overthrown in a postwar coup.
The U.N. coalition supporting action against Iraq had been put together strictly to reverse the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait, not for installing a new Iraqi government.
Gates said "there was always uncertainty" in the Bush administration as to whether Iraqi military officials and other leaders would overthrow Saddam after the war. He said that American uncertainty about losing the support of the international coalition was "less of a factor" in deciding to leave Saddam in power than "our own internal deliberations about what our war aims should be."
Gates was among the eight top U.S. officials, including Bush, who made the key decisions during this period.
The possibility of capturing Saddam or overthrowing his government "was discussed at length . . . during the period leading up to the war," Gates said. "We specifically decided not to make it a war aim so that we would not set ourselves objectives that we were not confident we could accomplish."

by Bhavesh Jinadra by CNB