Word: baath
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...though the Iraqi government had died in its sleep. Baath Party enforcers were nowhere to be found on the street corners that morning. Official minders did not turn up as usual to chaperone foreign journalists. State TV went off the air, and for the first time since the war began, Information Minister Mohammed Saeed al-Sahaf did not appear to make his extraterrestrial pronouncements of impending victory. Iraqi military uniforms and weapons were lying in ditches, artillery pieces abandoned under bridges. CIA eavesdroppers monitoring official communications heard ... nothing--no orders being given, no commands to move Iraqi forces...
...city, the people of Baghdad went out to see for themselves. Some sought out the reporters they once talked to only in the thickest code to tell them awful stories and show their scars. Some sought out soldiers to tell them what to blow up, to urge that every Baath office and safe house be brought down. "We've been waiting for you for a long time," a young man told the first American...
...they sought to set up the most rudimentary kind of authority, U.S. and British officials confronted the challenge of detoxifying a 24-year tyranny. How could they know the good guys from the bad, know how far down the Baath Party ladder to purge, know which tribal leaders were legitimate representatives of their people and which had been in Saddam's pocket? In a very real and horrifying way, the ransacking of government offices and power centers--all the resentment and retribution against the network of stoolies, spies and party apparatchiks--is part of the de-Baathification that both critics...
...holdouts from the Saddam regime. But they are looters, not peshmerga - a nasty bunch reminiscent of the mobs that followed medieval armies, killing the wounded left on the battlefield and stripping them of their valuables. The Kurdish marauders tell stories of villages full of armed members of Saddam's Baath party, or of Iraqi generals. They even ask journalists to call in U.S. air strikes. Their stories are lies, though, and in private they discuss with relish how many cars there are for the taking in the prosperous settlements...
...ground in cities captured by the coalition. Instead, however, it appears to be the religious structures of the Shiite clergy - with which the U.S. has, at best, an awkward relationship - that have come to the fore, being the only coherent national organizational structure once the war left the Baath Party and the security services in disarray. Shiite Islam, unlike the Sunni variant, concentrates religious authority along local and regional lines. The ability of the Shiite clerical hierarchy in Najaf to project its authority into Baghdad, for example, has been visible over the past week: Acting on orders from Najaf, local...