Word: iranian
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...happened with surreal swiftness. One moment, the pageant of Reaganism was proceeding, with brilliant fireworks over the harbor. The next moment, the Iranian scandal burst up through the floorboards. Strange blackbirds of policy flapped out of the White House basement. The Reagan Administration, the phenomenon that had defined so much of the '80s, that had given the decade its agenda and style, seemed to collapse in a bizarre shambles...
...course there are the dark images of the Iranian fiasco: the President's men skulking around, with cake and Bible and guns, on ventures so goofy as to seem unhinged; the tablets of Valium that Robert McFarlane swallowed. The Iran affair destroyed Reagan's nimbus of immunity, subverted his magic. His political authority derived from the idea that Ronald Reagan believed certain simple things profoundly, with an incorruptible candor. He would bob his head, in the way he has, and smile and say, "Here I stand: I can do no other." Martin Luther washed up on the beaches of Malibu...
...desperate battle for the once thriving port of Basra, Iraq's second largest city, has become the longest and most crucial campaign in the 6 1/2- year Iran-Iraq war. More than 20,000 Iranian troops and 10,000 Iraqis have died since Jan. 9, when Iranian Revolutionary Guards attacked Iraqi defenses along the Shatt al Arab, a broad waterway that forms the southern frontier of the warring nations, and advanced on Basra some ten miles away. The stakes in the fighting, which has settled into a ferocious standoff a few miles outside the city, could not be higher...
...menacing quiet fills the empty streets. Stray dogs and cats poke through the rubble of collapsed houses destroyed by Iranian 122-mm rockets. Here a shell has gouged a water-filled crater in the center of a once lovingly manicured lawn. There a shattered iron gate hangs limply from its hinges outside a small garage. An occasional car filled with wide-eyed Iraqi sightseers cruises the streets, but the passengers seldom stop. It is as if they are afraid the attacks will resume any moment...
Another group of kidnappers, the pro-Iranian Revolutionary Justice Organization, has threatened to kill French hostage Jean-Louis Normandin, 35, unless France clarifies its policy on terrorism and arms shipments to Iraq. Iran and Iraq have been at war since September...