Word: iraq
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Ahmed Chalabi, a 54-year-old Iraqi businessman, has lived in exile for 26 years, but he keeps dreaming the same dream: as leader of the opposition to Saddam Hussein, he will persuade Washington to designate large swaths of Iraq as no-fly/no- drive zones, where U.S. air power will shelter a nascent anti-Saddam revolution. Inside these enclaves, Chalabi will build a guerrilla force financed by "liberated" Iraqi oil. One day, under the protection of U.S. warplanes, 10,000 fighters will march on Baghdad, slicing away pieces of Saddam's territory as their offensives persuade demoralized Iraqi army...
General Anthony Zinni, the four-star who leads the U.S. military in the Persian Gulf, spent months among dissidents in northern Iraq after the 1991 war, and is paid to judge such things. He has a recurrent nightmare: What if the U.S. fell in with schemes like Chalabi's? Privately he thinks they're "harebrained," and he doesn't warm to such notions in public either. "I've heard of schemes where people are saying, 'Create an enclave, guarantee air support,'" he sighs. "Those are the kinds of things we have to be very careful of." Yes, President Clinton signed...
Until last Sunday. Then the President shocked many veteran Iraq watchers by publicly embracing the bill and promising to "do what we can" to bring down Iraq's perpetually menacing dictator. As Clinton told the world that he had aborted the launch of hundreds of Tomahawk cruise missiles, his Iraq policy seemed to wear a stern new look. Was this goodbye containment, hello replacement? Not exactly. Clinton made it clear the reason for aborting military action last week was to preserve unfettered inspection of Iraq's arsenal, the one semi-working mechanism for keeping Saddam's nasty ambitions in check...
...Iraq crisis Berger has been very much alive and at the center of the Clinton foreign policy team, as he has been so often this year. It was Berger who sprinted back and forth between his West Wing desk to the Oval Office and even to the President's putting green, working to muster all the pieces for a strong strike against Saddam. And it was Berger who went on TV to explain that Saddam's capitulation wasn't good enough. His co-workers call him a maestro--the man who puts together foreign policy and helps the President choose...
...Waller flew with aviators now stationed in the Persian Gulf. "I can imagine how their hearts are racing," says Waller, our State Department correspondent. "Catapulting off a carrier and landing on it are almost as dangerous as combat." Waller's previous book, Commandos, was based on his reporting on Iraq's invasion of Kuwait and the resulting Gulf War, which gave him an especially informed perspective as he covered last week's showdown with Saddam Hussein...