OK. Let’s take a break from Turk­ish elec­tions. In other news, Sad­dam has bus­ied him­self recently with order­ing the assas­si­na­tion of Iraqi dis­si­dents abroad, par­tic­u­larly in Lon­don where the Iraqi National Con­gress is based. The goal is to pre­vent them from mak­ing plans to form a gov­ern­ment after the removal of Sad­dam.
The Iraqi strong­man has report­edly con­tacted Libyan leader Col. Muam­mar Gaddafi for help in get­ting this work done, since the Libyans have a net­work of sleeper cells based in Britain in Europe.

In the past few months, senior mem­bers of his Ba’athist regime have vis­ited a num­ber of Arab coun­tries to lobby for sup­port. Intel­li­gence offi­cials were par­tic­u­larly inter­ested in a recent visit to Libya by Saddam’s cousin, Ali Has­san al-Majid, who is wanted for war crimes over his role in using chem­i­cal weapons against the Kurds at Hal­abja in 1988. “Chem­i­cal Ali”, as he is known in Bagh­dad, spent sev­eral hours with Col Gaddafi.
Apart from ask­ing for assis­tance with killing oppo­si­tion fig­ures, al-Majid is also believed to have asked for Libyan help in car­ry­ing out ter­ror­ist attacks against British and US tar­gets in Europe and the Mid­dle East. Sad­dam is also keen to tar­get the Gulf states of Bahrain and Qatar, which are the main bases for US forces in the region. The Libyan leader’s response to the requests is not known.

If this is true, Sad­dam is feel­ing the heat (and Libya is back up to its old tricks.) My worry is that a des­per­ate Sad­dam could strike out with more ter­ror­ist cells or with what­ever weapons of mass destruc­tion he may already pos­sess in a “use ‘em or lose ‘em” tac­tic brought on by Amer­i­can rhetor­i­cal bludgeoning.