Word: baathists
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Other promised liberalizations also offer little comfort to ordinary Iraqis. A new constitution that the regime says it will enact soon would grant Iraq's Kurdish minority a degree of autonomy, legalize political parties other than Saddam's Baathist organization, ban arbitrary arrests and guarantee freedom of expression and the right to hold peaceful demonstrations. An earlier amendment that would have made Saddam President for life has been scrapped. The proposed constitution, however, contains a loophole that leaves many Iraqis cynical about change: by declaring a state of emergency, the President could quickly abrogate these newfound freedoms...
...were the Kurds Saddam's only new victims. While civilians throughout Iraq struggled to replace shattered power plants and water lines -- not to mention scrounging for food -- the regime also threw its energy into smashing the Shi'ites in the south who want Saddam's secular Baathist regime replaced by Islamic rule. In the five weeks since the liberation of Kuwait, Baghdad has retaken every major rebel-held city and town, sometimes with terrifying vindictiveness...
Born in 1940 in Saddam's hometown of Tikrit, Majid began his career in the Baath Party's internal-security branch, whimsically called the Instrument of Yearning. Its reputation for rough torture made it the most feared organization in Iraq. Grateful for Majid's help in ridding him of Baathist rivals, Saddam made him Minister of Municipalities. But his real job was to be Saddam's No. 1 enforcer...
...hopeful scenario, from the West's vantage point, was that the chaos would provoke the army, or perhaps one of Saddam's Baathist associates, to grab power. "At some point," says a Bush Administration official, "somebody is going to say, 'The country is coming apart, and we have to put a stop to it.' And the way to do that is to remove Saddam himself." His would-be deposer, however, may have to move fast, while there is still a country...
...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...