"We have not been targeting Mr. Saddam Hussein," says Gen. Colin Powell. "We’re not targeting any individual," says President Bush. "That’s not the way we fight wars anyway," says Gen. H. Norman Schwarzkopf.

Well, why not?

The man took power by assassination, kept it by murder, left a million dead in a war of aggression against Iran, gassed the Kurds, and obliterated Kuwait. He bombs Israeli civilians, tortures prisoners, fouls the sea with oil, and threatens chemical and biological warfare.

Why not just kill him? Or-to be more precise-now that our bombers have leveled his palace and scoured the skies trying to get a bead on him, why pretend he is not a target?

People make three basic arguments against targeting Saddam. Two of them are unconvincing. A third has some substance-and pretty much assures that no American leader is going to admit to targeting a foreign leader.

Morality. Some argue that it is-immoral to target anyone for assassination, even a person as evil as Saddam.

Whether retributive killing is ever justified poses a nice moral question. Thus we argue endlessly about the death penalty.

But we would not be killing Saddam solely to punish him for crimes he has already committed. We would be killing him to save tens of thousands of other, innocent lives by ending the war, or at least shortening it. Most lives thereby spared would be Iraqi. Many would be American.

The last refuge of the moralists is that it is somehow worse to kill an identified person by design than to kill anonymous souls who happen to be in the way of a thrust at a military target. But Saddam is a military target. And while planned killings are worse than accidental killings, deaths caused by an allied thrust into Kuwait would hardly be accidental.

Even if you oppose any American use of force to stop Saddam’s aggression, that bridge has been crossed. Now that the war machine is grinding along, a nice, clean hit on Saddam would be a lesser evil by far than the deaths of babies, civilians, conscripts, and others.

For those who believe this is a just war, it would be immoral not to try to make it less bloody by doing our best to kill Saddam.

Legality. The law has long justified killing in self-defense and killing people who threaten the lives of innocent others. The second doctrine fits Saddam like a glove. So does the collective self-defense corollary of the first, as codified in the United Nations Charter.

But what about U.S. Executive Order 12333? It states: "No person employed by or acting on behalf of the United States shall engage in, or conspire to engage in, assassination."

This might seem to suggest that the United States cannot send a smart bomb or a sharpshooter or an agent with a hand grenade or a poisoned pizza to knock off Saddam.

A couple of years ago, however, then State Department Legal Adviser Abraham Sofaer explained that "assassination" means only the "unlawful" killing of identified individuals for political purposes.

That’s one way to navigate around the executive order. But why take such a circular route, one that relies on a hairsplitting interpretation that could be twisted to justify all manner of peacetime assassinations? The president can repeal or amend the order any time he pleases, or (at least in wartime) authorize an exception without a public announcement.

More important, in a war to repel aggression, it is no more an "assassination" to kill the commander of the aggressor’s armed forces than it is to kill an enemy soldier in the field.

During World War II, for example, President Roosevelt ordered a hit on Adm. Isoroku Yamamoto, an architect of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. When the Navy intercepted Yamamoto’s flight plans, 18 U.S. warplanes went after him and killed him.

International law theorists in the courts of Europe frowned on the treacherous killing of monarchs even in war-an implicit survival pact among the world’s kings and queens. But this was before the U.N. Charter and principles of the Nuremberg trials outlawed wars of aggression and held those who launch them criminally responsible.

Killing Saddam would thus be lawful, as killing Gen. Manuel Antonio Noriega a few years ago would not have been: Noriega’s crimes did not include cross-border aggression.

The legal questions are trickier in situations not involving conventional war, and can lead to some strange rationalizations.

Take the apparent American effort in April 1986 to kill Muammar al-Qaddafi by bombing the military barracks in which he and his family lived.

The bombs missed Qaddafi but killed others, including his 18-month-old adopted daughter. President Reagan had no apology for the child’s death. But he insisted that "we weren’t… dropping those tons of bombs hoping to blow that man up."

"As long as we didn’t know [Qaddafi] had a daughter," as columnist Michael Kinsley explained this illogic, "it’s fine to kill her. Just don’t kill him."

And so emerges the perverse principle that it’s better to camouflage your objective by blowing up everyone in the neighborhood than to take a clean shot at the source of the evil.

One could have advanced a legal argument for targeting Qaddafi to stop his terrorist acts of war against Americans. The argument becomes far more compelling in a U.N.-sponsored, congressionally approved war to stop aggression by Saddam.

Realpolitik. In the end, though, pragmatic considerations counsel against targeting Saddam openly.

Most obviously, a botched attempt, or even a successful one, might provoke a wave of terror against Kuwaiti civilians and American prisoners. A terrible prospect-though perhaps a risk worth taking compared to the alternative of a bloody ground war.

A stronger argument against openly targeting Saddam is the danger of putting the world on a slippery slope toward legitimizing assassination as a political weapon. No wonder our leaders don’t like to talk about it.

Targeting Saddam, who needs no instruction in assassination, might not greatly increase the immediate danger to President Bush. But it would make assassination a more thinkable option to all kinds of other people for years to come, in peace as well as in war.

Among those who might take such a precedent to extremes is the Central Intelligence Agency, which not so long ago was enlisting mafiosi in idiotic swipes at Fidel Castro.

The other reasons not to target Saddam openly boil down to public relations.

Given how long it took thousands of GIs to track down Noriega in little Panama, we can’t be sure of finding Saddam anytime soon. And if we publicly commit ourselves to nailing him, as one White House official told Time magazine, "Every day that Saddam survived would be seen as a victory for him and a loss for us."

In addition, because so many people mistakenly believe it would be immoral or illegal to target. Saddam, it could cost us the moral high ground in world opinion. And the "martyrdom" of the barbarian-idol of so many Arabs would fuel their rabid hatred of America.

And so Gen. Powell says, "What we were going after was the command and control of the Iraqi armed forces … rather than chasing somebody around the countryside." And if the chief commander and controller happens to be in a building we blow up, well …

"No one will weep when he’s gone," says President Bush. "I for one will not weep for him," says British Prime Minister-John Major. "I don’t think any of us would have shed tears if that had happened," said President Reagan after our bombers did not try to kill Qaddafi.

So we will kill Saddam if we can. But we can’t be too obvious about it. It may be disingenuous. But no president has ever told the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth about his war aims. And no president ever will.