Word: ath
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...Iraqi High Tribunal (IHT), complaining that Shi'ite and Kurdish political leaders were leaning on him for being too lenient toward Saddam's courtroom antics. The judge who was due to succeed him was blocked by Shi'ite officials because he had been a member of the Ba'ath Party. It didn't help that three defense lawyers were assassinated during the trial...
...anger has been stoked by rumors, currently rife in Baghdad's political circles, that the U.S. is seeking to replace the Shi'ite-led government of Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki with a more secular leadership, perhaps including some elements of Saddam Hussein's Ba'ath party. Unsurprisngly, relations between al-Maliki and the U.S. have turned distinctly prickly. Sources tell TIME that the Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani, the supreme religious figure in Iraqi Shi'ism, has been alarmed by these rumors and asked al-Maliki about them when the Prime Minister visited the cleric in Najaf last month...
...facing their professors. Since the fall of Saddam Hussein, more than 180 Iraqi academics have been murdered. Some were targeted by terrorists determined to sow chaos into post-Saddam Iraq; others were victims of a murderous campaign by Shi'ite death squads against former members of Saddam's Ba'ath party. "In Saddam's day, you had to be a member of the party if you wanted to be a teacher," al-Rawi told me. "Most of us were members only in name, not by conviction - but now it's come back to haunt us. Any day now, I expect...
Conservatives have always considered this sort of vague, unaccountable government mandate, based on the hunches and grand visions of government officials, to be inherently dangerous. After all, even if Iraq had had weapons of mass destruction, we still would not have been prepared to replace the Ba’ath Party, prevent Iran from being emboldened by the power vacuum in Iraq, or retain enough troops to threaten North Korea. There were better options available, yet Republicans committed the country to this experiment with enthusiasm...
...contempt. And unless they're offering a credible incentive, they're probably wasting their breath: Syria has withstood years of pressure and harangues from the U.S. - perhaps aware that the U.S. and Israel, knowing that the most likely alternative is the Muslim Brotherhood, actually want to keep the Ba'ath regime in place. Syria will refrain from confronting its more powerful enemies, but is unlikely to lift a finger to help them unless it can see in that course a road to end its isolation, and to a resumption of talks aimed at returning the Golan Heights, captured by Israel...