COLUMN ONE : The Risk in Targeting Hussein : Assassinating Iraq’s leader would end the war quickly, many believe. But finding and killing him wouldn’t be easy, and political repercussions could be severe.

Should the United States and its allies assassinate Iraqi President Saddam Hussein?

That question--always in the background since the Persian Gulf crisis began--has become more pertinent in recent days. Even if Iraq heeds President Bush’s ultimatum to withdraw from Kuwait by noon EST today, the concern remains: Will the region be safe as long as Saddam Hussein lives?

The Bush Administration fears that even a militarily defeated Hussein would pose a continued threat to Western interests and Iraq’s strategically vital neighbors. Still in power, Hussein could seek to cast himself as a hero in the Arab world, much as Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser did when he regained the presidency following that country’s drubbing by Israel in 1967. This could enable Hussein to wreak havoc through terrorism or sabotage and try to rebuild his still-substantial armed forces.

Indeed, some Western analysts believe that Hussein’s death might mean an immediate end to the war--preventing the slaughter of hundreds, perhaps thousands, of American soldiers as well as innumerable Iraqis in a bloody ground conflict.

“One of the things we want is to be sure he doesn’t repeat this adventure,” says former CIA director William E. Colby. “The commander of the enemy force is a legitimate target. I would cheerfully have carried the bomb into Hitler’s bunker.”

At the same time, a direct attempt on Hussein’s life is fraught with political risks, and travels over uncertain moral ground.

Political murder has a long and inglorious history, dating back through biblical times. Even the term “assassin” originated in the Mideast. Originally hashshashin, or hashish addict, it derived from the 11th-Century Ishmaili sect of the Shiite Muslims, whose method of terrorizing their enemies included murdering prominent adversaries.

Many assassinations have been linked directly with wars. In the 16th Century, British statesman and scholar Sir Thomas More declared that treacherous assassinations of those “responsible for the wars” were justified if destruction of the innocent would thus be prevented. And in the American Civil War, Abraham Lincoln was fatally wounded by Confederate sympathizer John Wilkes Booth on April 14, 1865--only five days before the surrender of the Southern troops.

Today, however, neither the wisdom nor the legality of attempting to kill the Iraqi leader is universally accepted. U.S. policy strictly prohibits American agencies from engineering the killing of foreign leaders without specific authorization from the President--the legacy of a string of aborted U.S. assassination attempts, from the plot against Prime Minister Patrice Lumumba of the Congo in 1961 to various schemes to remove Cuba’s Fidel Castro.

And Administration officials privately concede that their difficulty in tracking down Gen. Manuel A. Noriega in Panama during the 1989 invasion of that country has sobered them to the challenge of finding a hostile foreign leader, even with highly trained special operations commandos. “I don’t detect much interest anywhere in the government in going in and trying to root (Hussein) out of Baghdad,” one knowledgeable strategist says. “We couldn’t find Noriega with 30,000 troops in the same city.”

But what if Hussein happened to be killed by an allied bomb during wartime? Although Bush and Defense Secretary Dick Cheney have insisted that they are not “targeting” any individual, the bombing of sites that could shelter Hussein suggests that causing his death has been an undeclared war aim since the first attacks on Baghdad on Jan. 17.

And the President has publicly invited Iraqis to oust the leader who has brought so much destruction on them. “There is another way for the bloodshed to stop,” Bush said earlier this month. “And that is for the Iraqi military and the Iraqi people to take matters into their own hands and to force Saddam Hussein, the dictator, to step aside.” Previously, Bush had said bluntly: “No one will weep for (Hussein) when he is gone.”

The notion of removing Hussein violently appears to have widespread support among Americans. In a Feb. 15 Newsweek poll, 65% of respondents said they would support the covert assassination of Hussein to end the war quickly; 35% said such an attempt would be wrong even if it worked.

Technically, the United States has the capability either to assassinate Saddam Hussein or to pursue him as part of a military attack. Elite U.S. commando units--the Navy’s SEALs, the Army’s Green Berets, Rangers and Delta Force teams and the Air Force’s First Special Operations Wing--are specially trained to penetrate enemy territory and to hunt down specific targets, such as terrorists.

But if the Bush Administration were to target the Iraqi leader for extinction, analysts warn that such a declaration would go beyond the United Nations’ mandate of expelling Iraq from Kuwait and could well splinter the U.S.-led coalition. It also could further elevate Hussein in the eyes of some radical Arabs--and potentially intensify Muslim anger at Western intervention in the Mideast.

And some experts say it would set the United States up for likely failure--unless Washington were committed to risking thousands of additional casualties by marching on Baghdad to seek out Hussein.

Meticulous in his attention to personal security, Hussein is believed to be shielded by a network of reinforced underground bunkers that may be impervious to U.S. bombs. His location within Iraq--a well-guarded secret even in peacetime--is known by only a few.

Military officials say he and his heavily armed security forces are constantly on the move, possibly even sleeping in several places in a single night. He often stays in residential neighborhoods, which U.S. commanders have ruled out as targets to avert civilian casualties.

Moreover, U.S. officials say that Hussein’s tight political control--and his penchant for executing all opponents--have made Iraq an exceptionally tough place to develop so-called human intelligence, or spies on the ground. Establishing or employing such channels during wartime is even more difficult.

“I think that was recognized as a foolish mission to begin with,” says Air Force Col. Ralph Cossa, a Middle East specialist at the National Defense University’s Institute for National Strategic Studies in Washington. “He’s extremely well-protected. He’s got all sorts of hiding places. He’s more than likely to surround himself with women and children. . . . It sets us up for an unnecessary defeat.”

At the start of the current conflict--the best time to have caught Hussein by surprise in a raid on a military target--U.S. commanders made it clear that their plans for “decapitating” the enemy might well include killing its supreme commander. And they apparently had this in mind on Jan. 17, when allied bombers first struck command-and-control centers and Hussein’s palace in Baghdad.

Indeed, one night during the first week of the war, allied intelligence officials believed they had pinpointed Hussein’s whereabouts, but the bombers that were dispatched to the site were unable to attack because a storm front blew across central Iraq. “We didn’t get to cross the target,” a senior U.S. government official told the Washington Post.

A week into the war, Army Gen. Colin L. Powell, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, implied that the obstacles to eliminating Hussein were one reason that his death was not a stated goal. Referring to the embarrassing delay in locating Panama’s Noriega during the U.S. invasion, Powell said he had “learned from previous experience how difficult it can be to track a head of state in whom you might be interested.”

The targeting of leaders by the military during wars has been common in recent history. During World War II, U.S. forces shot down a military plane known to be carrying Admiral Isoruku Yamamoto, the commander of the Japanese navy, who had been instrumental in planning the attack on Pearl Harbor. American commanders went after Yamamoto after intelligence agents intercepted a message including details of an inspection tour that he had planned.

Hitler narrowly escaped an assassination attempt by a group of German soldiers and civilians in 1944. After years of planning, the conspirators, led by Col. Count Claus von Stauffenberg, exploded a bomb at a conference at Hitler’s headquarters in East Prussia. The Nazi leader suffered only superficial injuries. Most of those involved were executed.

Current U.S. policy was issued in 1976 as an executive order. It was born amid congressional worries that the Central Intelligence Agency had been trying to influence world events--often with embarrassing or disastrous consequences. Hearings by the Senate Intelligence Committee in the mid-1970s linked the CIA to plots against Cuba’s Castro and to Prime Minister Lumumba of the Congo. Lumumba was murdered by opposition Congolese soldiers in 1961 before poison shipped by the CIA could be administered.

Earlier, dissidents armed by the CIA killed dictator Rafael L. Trujillo in the Dominican Republic in 1961 and a CIA-supported coup resulted in the killing of Ngo Dinh Diem, South Vietnam’s first president, in 1963.

Under the policy, which was reaffirmed in 1981, outright assassinations of foreign adversaries by U.S. government agencies are prohibited without a specific order from the President. Presumably the order would be in writing, and the White House most likely would privately inform the chairmen and ranking members of the House and Senate intelligence committees.

The Bush Aministration reinterpreted the order in 1989, saying that it did not apply if a foreign leader was killed as an unintended consequence of an action undertaken or supported by the U.S. government. The same year, the Army’s top lawyer issued an opinion that allowed for the killing of senior enemy military commanders as part of a “decapitation” strategy. Pentagon officials said last fall that this could make Hussein, as commander in chief of Iraqi military forces, a legal target.

No other country has such a formal restriction on assassinations by government agents. At the same time, no other members of the anti-Iraq coalition have said publicly that they have made Hussein an assassination target.

But lawmakers differ on the import of the executive order. Rep. Dave McCurdy (D-Okla.), recently appointed chairman of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, asserts that under his reading, the directive would restrain any calculated attempt to kill Hussein. But Rep. Anthony C. Beilenson (D-Los Angeles), McCurdy’s predecessor, and Colby, who was CIA director from 1973 to 1976, maintain that Bush could make Hussein fair game simply by declaring him an exception to the executive order. (Indeed, former President Ronald Reagan ordered U.S. troops to bomb Libya with the apparent aim of killing strongman Moammar Kadafi in 1986.)

In any case, Beilenson and Colby contend that the order does not apply during wartime.

Proponents argue that killing Saddam Hussein would avert U.S.--and Iraqi--deaths. “It would be hard to argue against targeting someone whose removal would save the lives of all his own people as well as however many of our people might be involved in stopping his aggression,” says Beilenson, who opposed the decision to go to war but backs the notion of eliminating the Iraqi leader.

Nevertheless, the subject is a sensitive one, as former Air Force chief of staff, Gen. Michael J. Dugan, found out last September. In an interview, Dugan disclosed that U.S. military plans called for an air campaign designed in part to “decapitate” Iraqi leadership by targeting Hussein, his family, his senior commanders, his palace guard and even his mistress. Dugan was subsequently dismissed for exercising “poor judgment at a very sensitive time.”

Following Dugan’s dismissal, Defense Secretary Cheney noted pointedly that among the rules that the general violated was that “we never talk about the targeting of specific individuals who are officials of other governments.”

Legality aside, some experts contend that going after Hussein personally could result in adverse political consequences that could damage America’s national interests.

Abraham D. Sofaer, former legal adviser to the State Department under Reagan and Bush, warns that targeting Hussein would “invite revenge against the leaders who order it as well as their citizens and property.” Rather, Sofaer says, the United States “has a substantial interest in discouraging acceptance of the killing of political leaders as a routine measure, even in self-defense. Tyrants and terrorists are likely to be better than

Americans at this sort of thing.”

Rep. Lee H. Hamilton (D-Ind.), chairman of the House Foreign Affairs subcommittee on Europe and the Middle East, agrees. “When we personalize the conflict, we undercut our goals of characterizing the conflict as one between Iraqi aggression and the world community,” Hamilton says. “Targeting Saddam would help him portray himself throughout the Arab world as a martyr who has single-handedly taken on the West.”

Even targeting Hussein’s bunker for a military attack could pose some risks. Most Mideast experts agree that Saddam Hussein’s death would end the war, but they disagree widely about who would succeed the Iraqi dictator or what the consequences would be for the West.

Michael C. Hudson, a specialist in Middle Eastern politics at Georgetown University, points out that many Arabs already believe that the United States is trying to kill Hussein--provoking anger at Western intervention even among those who oppose Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait. If the killing of Hussein were seen as deliberate, it could lead to terrorism, increased radicalism among Arab masses and a backlash against the regimes in Saudi Arabia, Egypt and elsewhere, Hudson says.

But Daniel Pipes, director of the Foreign Policy Institute in Philadelphia, contends that any initial anger would be outweighed by Arab awe at the West’s ability to accomplish such an objective. His greatest concern is not that Hussein might survive--with his military decimated and his claims of moral victory transparently bankrupt. Rather, Pipes says, he worries that Hussein’s absence could set off a “Lebanonization” of Iraq, which in turn would require a continued U.S. presence in the region.

“If the regime is in place and one of (Hussein’s) unpleasant cohorts replace him, then we’re OK,” says Pipes, a Mideast specialist. “But if he and the regime go down together, I see chaos internally. The Kurds and Shiites battling each other. The Iranians making a play for either controlling territory or trying to take over. The Turks or Syrians might try to take some territory. I worry about that more than Saddam staying in power.”

Current U.S. support for eliminating Saddam Hussein is certain to intensify if a ground war ensues and Hussein follows through on his threat to unleash chemical weapons against allied troops. “That changes the situation,” says Rep. Mel Levine (D-Santa Monica). “There will be a cry for a very strong response.”

Even under such circumstances, the National Defense University’s Cossa argues that it would still be possible to single Hussein out for punishment without assassinating him. “It doesn’t mean you have to go in and get him,” he says. “You make it clear you have to have war crimes trials.”

Many U.S. lawmakers and analysts maintain that the most desirable scenario to remove Hussein would be a coup--by Arab Baath Socialist Party colleagues or the military elite. Some say that once the Iraqis are able to see the extent of the death and destruction that Hussein has brought on his once-proud nation--with nothing to show for it--his overthrow will be inevitable.

“Saddam Hussein is finished,” predicts Prince Bandar ibn Sultan, Saudi Arabia’s ambassador to the United States. “The Iraqis have ways and means. They have not had problems in the past doing that kind of thing. . . . Think of his army now, whatever is left of it, heading back home.”

Times researchers Aleta Embrey, Abebe Gessesse and Pat Welch contributed to this story.