Word: iraq
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Iraq is preparing to open its doors to foreign oil companies in a big way. Petroleum experts believe the war-torn country is underexplored and could potentially rival Saudi Arabia in oil reserves. And so the biggest names in the industry will put in bids for 20-year contracts on six of Iraq's largest oil fields and two of its largest gas fields, with the Iraqi Oil Ministry scheduled to announce the winning bidders on June 29 and 30. In the running are Exxon Mobil, Shell and BP as well as smaller Chinese, Russian and other state companies. Winners...
...just the CIA-assisted coup in 1953 against the popular democratic Prime Minister Mohammed Mossadegh, which Obama mentioned in his Cairo speech. It was also the Western support for the Shah and, worst of all in the minds of Iranians, the U.S. support for Saddam Hussein in the Iran-Iraq war of the 1980s, including the provision of chemicals that Saddam used to concoct poison gas. This remains an open wound in Iran. (See "In Tehran, Terror in Plain Clothes...
...defines the current division at the top of the Iranian establishment: the breach is between the generation that made the revolution of 1979 - leaders like Mir-Hossein Mousavi, the former Presidents Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani and Mohammed Khatami, among others - and the generation that fought the Iran-Iraq war, led by Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and his cohort among the battle-hardened leadership of the Revolutionary Guards Corps. The war led to a significant militarization of Iranian society, and the Supreme Leader, a member of the 1970s generation, has drifted away from his contemporaries toward the military. Among the rumors and major...
...compared Obama's diffidence to Ronald Reagan's forcefulness in proclaiming the Soviet Union an "evil empire" in the 1980s - but even the most pro-American Iranians were infuriated by George W. Bush's attempt to lash their country into an "axis of evil" with their mortal enemy Iraq and North Korea. The situations in Iran and the Soviet Union were nowhere near analogous. Iranians in the streets were looking for greater freedom, not the overthrow of the regime. The neocon effort to turn the Iranians into East European rebels against the Soviet Union was as crudely misleading as Benjamin...
...June 23, Florida Senator Bill Nelson and Massachusetts Representative Jim McGovern introduced legislation, the Fairness to Surviving Spouses Act, that would nix the widow penalty for good. To leverage their message, they were joined by both Goukassian and another military widow, Diana Engstrom, whose husband was killed in Iraq in 2004 in a rocket-propelled-grenade attack. Engstrom, a Kosovo native, found out afterward that she, too, would be deported because she'd been married for less than the two years required for an immigrant spouse's legal residence eligibility...