Word: baathist
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...intervene in the case, which the Bush Administration is determined not to do. U.S. civilian authorities in Iraq abolished the death penalty after Saddam's fall in 2003, out of fear that it could be too easily abused by Iraqis out to settle scores with their former Baathist tormentors. But capital punishment returned with the ratification of a new constitution in 2005. Whatever the Administration's true feelings about the wisdom of executing Saddam in such a heated environment, the U.S. appears prepared to allow the Iraqis to do as they please. When the hanging happens, it will no doubt...
...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...
...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 of coup plots. However, in 1979, when Al-Bakr proposed a federation with the neighboring Baathist regime of Syria, an agreement in which Syrian President Hafez Assad would become the heir apparent to a united Syria-Iraqi Baathist republic, Saddam acted. Al-Bakr was thrust out of office and Saddam assumed the presidency. In a single day, he had 68 Baath Party members arrested for disloyalty...
...dealing with the insurgency. By now, even Bush's dog Barney knows that extricating ourselves from Iraq will require cutting some ugly political deals with an assortment of rogues, who might be willing to help stabilize Iraq in return for a piece of the country's future: Sunni Baathist rebels and Shi'ite Islamists, Iranian spooks and Arab strongmen. That, at least, is one option currently under consideration by the Iraq Study Group, the panel headed by former Secretary of State James Baker, whom Rice prodded Bush to appoint in part to clip Rumsfeld's wings...
...know that former Baathists have been at the heart of the Sunni insurgency. In Anbar province, for example, a key financier and coordinator of the insurgency has been Rashid Taan Kazim--one of the few cards in the deck representing Saddam's leadership circle we weren't able to capture. We are negotiating in Jordan with Baathist representatives of the Sunni insurgency; we're trying to split them off from the al-Qaeda-in-Mesopotamia terrorists, and we may succeed if a re-Baathification program is put in place. It is less well known that Sadr's Shi'ite militia...