Word: beirutization
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True, a number of these tales unwind in the future, although science has little to do with most of them. The title story portrays Beirut some 30 years hence, still the scene of senseless, sectarian slaughter. A weary soldier conceives a plan for peace that actually begins to work, until it is sabotaged by the United Nations forces assigned to referee the carnage. The reason why is the extremely incisive point of the whole exercise. In The Largest Theme Park in the World, Ballard looks ahead past the planned 1992 economic unification of Europe to 1995, when many...
They gathered to demonstrate their unity to the world. Yet in the breaks between their formal sessions of solidarity posing at Beirut's Bristol Hotel last week, the disparate members of the Iraqi opposition could not resist heaping scorn on one another. Someone noted that before Youssef al-Durrah joined the Democratic Movement, he served as Saddam Hussein's press director. A rival pointed out that Hassan Alawi of the Arab Independents once worked as Saddam's speechwriter. And that communist, Naziha Doulaimi? Well, a critic readily volunteered, she had once been a full member of Saddam's Cabinet...
Given their zestful animosities, it was no wonder the delegates in Beirut failed to convince anyone that they constituted a serious alternative to Saddam's rule. The factions could not even manage to form a government-in- exile, let alone prove they could rule Iraq together in a post-Saddam world...
...Beirut opposition leaders insisted they had a plan to forestall all this. After Saddam's overthrow, they said, popular elections would determine who would rule Iraq. But that was quite a change of heart for the radical Shi'ites, whose aim had always been to create an Islamic regime. "We would like the people to elect us to implement it," explained Abu Bilal al Adib of the al-Dawa party, a sometime sponsor of terrorism. Another Shi'ite representative declared the verbal obeisance to democracy irrelevant. "It is the motivated minority that counts," said he, "and the Islamic movement...
That is among the reasons Washington still hopes Saddam will be replaced by someone within the Iraqi military. Some of the participants in Beirut also saw that as the best option. According to Bashir Samourai, a member of the Democratic Movement, the opposition has been in touch with the Iraqi military. In the event of a coup, he said, "they would then call us to come and participate." Washington knows that to give tangible support to such a scheme would only doom it to illegitimacy in the eyes of most Iraqis. So until the phone call from an Iraqi officer...