Word: iraq
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...investigation also coincided with the darkest period of the Administration: the Iraq war's dramatic downturn, the absence of WMD and festering problems in Afghanistan. And it unfolded as Bush was launching a wholesale course correction of his presidency in his second term. The pivot was hard to miss. Where Cheney had urged unilateral U.S. action in the first term, "in the second term we're going to be doing more diplomacy," Bush told top aides. Where Cheney had orchestrated a secret push to embrace the "dark side" in the war on terrorism, Bush instructed aides in 2005 to begin...
...Vice President argued the case in that Oval Office session, which was attended by the President and his top aides. He made his points in a calm, lawyerly style, saying Libby was a fall guy for critics of the Iraq war, a loyal team player caught up in a political dispute that never should have turned into a legal matter. They went after Scooter, Cheney would say, because they couldn't get his boss. But Bush pushed past the political dimension. "Did the jury get it right or wrong?" he asked...
...Cheney remain friends but have gone in different directions since leaving office. Bush returned to Texas, where he is raising millions for his presidential library and writing a book about his most pivotal decisions as President. Bush believes he put the war on terrorism and the war in Iraq on solid footings and will let history speak for his presidency. And Barack Obama? He "deserves my silence," Bush has said. (See pictures of George W. Bush...
...Kurdish provinces of Iraq are a world apart from the country inhabited by their fellow citizens. Basic services like electricity and fuel are good and increasingly available to all Kurds. Booming foreign investment has created a business culture complete with plans for a golf course as part of a gated-community outside the capital city of Erbil. There have been no U.S. combat fatalities in the autonomous Kurdish region since the fall of Saddam Hussein, in 2003. But there's one thing the Kurdish Regional Government (KRG) can no longer lord over the struggling central government in Baghdad: democracy...
...democracy gap with Baghdad," says Quil Lawrence, author of Invisible Nation: How the Kurds' Quest for Statehood Is Shaping Iraq and the Middle East. "After years of counting on American support because of its pro-Western, secular and, most importantly, pro-democratic image, the Kurdish parliament looks like a rubber stamp shared by the two main parties. Arab Iraq had peaceful provincial elections in January in which some entrenched parties lost and stepped down quietly. The Kurds need to show they can do the same." The Kurds, who speak a different language and are a separate ethnic group from their...