Word: baath
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...Tigris in the hardscrabble village of Owja, just south of Tikrit. Saddam never knew his father, a shepherd, who disappeared six months before he was born. He was raised alternately by his mother and his uncle, a fervent Iraqi nationalist and an early supporter of the Iraqi Baath party who had an early ideological influence on the ambitious young Saddam. It may have influenced his mother's choice of a name for the child: Saddam means "he who confronts...
...Saddam joined the pan-Arab nationalist Baath Party in 1957. Two years later, at the age of 22, Saddam was part of a Baathist plot to assassinate General Abdul Karim Kassem, who had overthrown the monarchy of King Faisal II a year before. Saddam escaped Iraq with a gunshot wound in the leg and spent the next six years in exile in Cairo where he had contacts with the CIA. The American spy agency was backing the Baathists at the time...
...When the Baath Party took power in Iraq in 1968, Saddam was named Vice President to the aging General Ahmed Hassan al-Bakr and spent the next 11 years mastering the way the regime worked and consolidating his own power and popular support. He launched a popular literacy campaign across Iraq and made education more accessible. He modernized the health system and helped al-Bakr mastermind the nationalization of Iraq's oil resources, seizing petroleum rights from international companies. He also was instrumental in building up the Baath Party's all-pervasive network of informants to ensure loyalty and warn...
...Kurds. The last best chance to restore order and hold Iraq together may be a dramatic ecumenical expansion of the Iraqi security forces under new leadership. We need to rectify the most serious error we made in Iraq after our initial military success and restore elements of the Baath Party, especially its former Shi'ite military leaders, to positions of power. Each of Iraq's neighbors, with the exception of Iran, believes that some version of this proposal is the best immediate course of action...
...over the Shi'ite majority and a rebellious Kurdish minority. Churchill later described Iraq's forced unity as one of his biggest mistakes. In 2003 the U.S. not only unseated the last and most brutal of Iraq's tyrants but also destroyed the institutions--notably the army and the Baath Party--that held Iraq together. The sectarian slaughter that followed the Feb. 22 bombing of the Shi'ite Golden Mosque in Samarra accelerated Iraq's disintegration...