Word: baath
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Middle East. At that time, he was not yet the President, but he had already become one of the most influential members in the Iraqi leadership. I also became closely acquainted with Aziz, who then served as editor in chief of Ath-Thawra, the main newspaper of the Baath Party...
Those were unstable times. The wing of the Baath Party in which Saddam and Aziz were members had just come to power. In the offices of both men there were submachine guns. Even at that stage, many features of Saddam's character were clearly evident, features that were preserved and developed further when he became the leader of Iraq. He possessed a firmness that often turned into cruelty, a strong will bordering on implacable stubbornness, a readiness to go charging toward his goal, regardless of obstacles and the price, and an overblown understanding of such concepts as honor and dignity...
Security remains the primary concern. "Even if Saddam himself is out," says a Saudi minister, "his Baath Party will probably control the country for a while, and there will be more than enough military hardware to threaten...
During the night, Baghdad was struck by the latest in a series of punishing raids, one of which damaged the headquarters of the country's ruling Arab Baath Socialist Party. AP correspondent Salah Nasrawi in Baghdad said the building was apparently vacannt at the time of the allied attack...
...ruling Baath Party had purged almost all non-Baathist officers from the army during the 1970s. As a result, the officer corps stopped seeing itself as the defender of a national entity known as Iraq and began to see its mission as the preservation of the party and its leader, Saddam Hussein. By 1980, a fifth of Iraq's work force was in the army, police or militia. The effect of Saddam's policies was to turn the country into an ideologically motivated military machine. Rumors of coups and plots within the military had no significant result on the conduct...