Word: iraq
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Nine years ago, the United States led a broad UN coalition in a war against Saddam Hussein and Iraq. It successfully repelled the Iraqis from Kuwait and its petroleum riches. However, the war ended in a stalemate, with Saddam still (ruthlessly) ruling Iraq and no way but sanctions and air strikes to keep his regime in check. With children dying from untreated diseases and malnutrition and the Kurds existing day-to-day by the humor of Saddam's Republican Guard, the Americans expressed concern about the situation. They bolstered the program of weapons inspections, the condition for lifting sanctions...
Today, Saddam remains in power in Iraq and Americans, often reservists, stand guard over more than half of its war-torn landscape, policing no-fly zones. Water treatment plants are not rebuilt. The economy is nonexistent, at least in measurable terms. Convoys of the few supplies that actually are ordered by the Iraqi government from the West's watchguards are often diverted, squandered or sold to those who can barely survive let alone pay for what was meant of be distributed for free...
...also not encouraging. I returned home a week later and heard the Sept. 1 NPR "Talk of the Nation," which discussed the issue for an hour with Patrick Clawson, the director for research at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, and Rania Masri, the coordinator of the Iraq Action Coalition. "Discussed" might be a bit too euphemistic for the polite attempt to maintain any semblance of decorum that ensued. Exchanging charges of American obstinance and anti-Islamic biases with claims of Iraqi corruption and noncompliance, the guests agreed on very little except the dire state of the average Iraqi...
...Romania, clear skies offered more eclipse--2 minutes, 23 seconds--than anywhere else. Turkey, Iran and Iraq also got an eyeful. But Iraqis, too strapped for the proper glasses, were advised to view the eclipse through glass blackened by candle soot...
...policy, which maintains that democratic Taiwan and the communist mainland are one nation that will eventually be reunified. "The U.S. is being very careful not to repeat the mistake that preceded the 1991 Gulf War, when Washington failed to make clear to Saddam Hussein that it would not tolerate Iraq's invading Kuwait," says TIME U.N. correspondent William Dowell. "This time they want to leave no room for doubt that they would respond if China attacks...