Word: basra
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Foreign Wars convention in Nashville in August 2002. "Regime change in Iraq would bring about a number of benefits to the region," he said, including "the chance to promote the values that can bring lasting peace." He quoted Ajami's conviction that after liberation, the streets of Baghdad and Basra would "erupt in joy in the same way as the throngs in Kabul greeted the Americans." By last summer, to the surprise of many old critics, Cheney's intellectual journey was complete. William Kristol, editor of the Weekly Standard, the Koran of neoconservative thought, was critical when Bush chose Cheney...
...Republican lawmaker, "was like a parrot bringing [Iraq] up all the time. It was getting on the President's nerves." At one point in the Camp David meeting after Sept. 11, Wolfowitz tried to persuade Bush to back a scheme to lop off the southern part of Iraq, including Basra, its third largest city, and some important oil fields. That went nowhere. And no matter how hard the intelligence agencies looked, they couldn't come up with a link between Saddam and Sept. 11 that might persuade Bush of the virtues of an early strike...
...from its field commanders, Pentagon officials asserted, and leaving much of its undermanned, underfed army on its own in the face of the allied onslaught. That may explain why U.S. and British troops encountered meager resistance as they pushed toward the oil-rich southern Iraqi city of Basra. One day into the ground war, allied forces secured the town of Safwan and the port city of Umm Qasr; Marines seized two vital oil fields that Saddam's forces may have been preparing to set ablaze. Iraqi forces managed to set fire to only nine of 1,000 oil wells...
...radically different strategy from what U.S. war planners had apparently anticipated. Rather than ceding the Shiite south and hunkering down for a showdown in Baghdad, Iraqi irregulars continue to put up tough fight across southern and central Iraq. The expected popular uprising and joyous welcome of coalition forces in Basra has not yet materialized, and Iraqi commanders have committed forces to slow the coalition advance in towns along the Euphrates, such as Nasiriyah, Najaf, Kerbala and Samawha, further south than expected. Iraqi political militias organized on guerrilla lines have put up stubborn, often suicidal resistance in towns all along...
...Earlier reports of a popular uprising in the besieged city of Basra may have been overstated, and British forces are preparing to fight their way into the town in order to avert a humanitarian catastrophe. Hundreds of Iraqi armored vehicles left the predominantly Shiite city Wednesday, and came under air attack by coalition aircraft. And in a surprise move whose purpose is not yet clear, the Medina division of Iraq's Republican Guard sent some 1,000 armored vehicles out of Baghdad toward the frontline positions of the U.S. 3rd Infantry Division. Although such a deployment would stiffen resistance...