Allied Attack on Hussein Said Foiled by Storm

Allied warplanes were reportedly sent last week to a site believed to be the location of Iraqi President Saddam Hussein, but a storm prevented them from attacking it.

Maj. Gen. Robert B. Johnston denied the report in today’s Washington Post, saying it “sounds like speculative reporting.”

“We have not sought him out personally,” Johnston said at a briefing in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia.

The newspaper today quoted a senior U.S. government official as saying, “We didn’t get to cross the target” because of bad weather.

The mission was part of an effort to cut Iraqi command communications links, the newspaper said. Further details could not be learned, it added.

Asked about the report, a Pentagon official said today, “We go after command and control targets, and if he happens to be there, great.”

The official, who spoke on condition he not be identified, said the military has known for years about Hussein’s underground bunkers and the difficulty of targeting him and that it would be “too inefficient and iffy” to spend a lot of energy going after him personally. But he said that if Hussein fulfills his duties by going to command posts to oversee operations, “then he is vulnerable” to U.S. attack.

President Bush, Defense Secretary Dick Cheney and Gen. Colin L. Powell, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, have repeatedly said that allied bombers are not “targeting any individual.”

A CIA task force has sought to deduce Hussein’s whereabouts from Iraqi communications patterns but has had intermittent results, the newspaper said.

Hussein travels mostly at night and uses look-alike decoys, the newspaper quoted officials as saying. Some officials were reported to have said he had moved to civilian residential areas to avoid allied attack.

A 1981 executive order bans the assassination of foreign leaders, but legal experts question whether the prohibition includes the commander of an enemy army in wartime. In 1943, American fliers deliberately killed Adm. Isoruku Yamamoto, commander of the Japanese fleet, in an attack on his transport plane.