For generals who liked being generals, this was not a happy situation; it put them out of the loop. Captains and majors were picking the targets . . . and it worked. We in Riyadh had succeeded in seizing from Washington the responsibility to pick targets, only to cede it to F-16 pilots over the battlefield. Sure, Washington still provided broad guidance; and sure, the generals in Riyadh told the killer scouts what divisions to orbit over and gave them the rules needed to prevent them from killing one another or breaking international laws; but in large measure, this war now belonged to the folks who were getting shot at.

CUTTING OFF THE SERPENT’S HEAD

In the most efficient of worlds, the centralized, totalitarian dictatorship should be most vulnerable to an efficient shot to the head—a bullet through the presidential window, followed by the quick elimination of presidential cronies, henchmen, military leaders, and possibly family; and then, for thoroughness’ sake, the removal of the party chiefs, the heads of the secret police, and the top people in intelligence. Finally, one cuts off the physical connections between capital and country—the networks of communications, roads, rail, and air. Now headless, the oppressed people ought to rise up to remove and replace the remaining causes of their misery.

Sadly, the world is not so easy to manage. Totalitarian systems are rarely smart and efficient. More often, they are stupid and clumsy and overcomplicated, and therefore not especially vulnerable to neat solutions.

That, at any rate, was one of the lessons of the Gulf War.

The original CHECKMATE offensive plans centered on a strategy of destroying Iraqi leadership. With this accomplished, it was asserted, all other goals—such as the Iraqi withdrawal from occupied Kuwait—would be achieved. The concept was to kill Saddam Hussein, or at least to discredit him, so he could not rule the nation; and a more rational leader or leaders could emerge, probably from the Iraqi Army.

When the CHECKMATE briefing was presented to Chuck Horner in Riyadh, he found this line of thinking intriguing; yet he did not feel he could afford to throw the kind of effort CHECKMATE envisaged into a hunt for Saddam Hussein, or, more broadly, into a campaign to incite an overthrow of his government. Certainly a good case could be made for killing Saddam. He was, after all, the head of Iraqi military forces, he devised its military strategy, and he gave orders about the disposition of forces. Therefore, while President Saddam Hussein was not directly targeted, it is safe to conclude that the Black Hole’s target lists included all the military command centers where Field Marshal Hussein might have been directing his forces.