Word: iraq
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Stripped of all insignia of rank, the soldier delivered to Iraq's infamous Abu Ghraib prison seemed just another anonymous victim of Saddam Hussein's capricious cruelty. He was swiftly executed, his bullet-ridden corpse crammed into an abandoned refrigerator. For General Kamel Sachet, a national hero, it was an ignominious...
...also an untimely one: five years later, in 2003, journalist Wendell Steavenson arrived in Iraq to "learn more about the locked-in years of Saddam's regime" and chose Sachet as the prism through which those years might best be refracted. In the resulting book, The Weight of a Mustard Seed (the title is a quote from the Koran), she tries to understand why Iraqis who deplored what was happening to their country became Saddam's accomplices. "How," she asks, "do ordinary little human cogs make up a torture machine...
...lieu of further oil revenue, Iraq will have to raise cash elsewhere to maintain roughly the existing level of government spending, which U.S. and Iraqi officials feel is necessary to keep the economy steady. Despite surpluses and positive economic signs, Iraq cannot currently generate cash on capital markets like other countries by the sale of bonds because of hundreds of unsettled claims worth billions of dollars related to Iraq's 1991 invasion of Kuwait. Scores of possible lawsuits by Kuwaitis and Westerners lurk in countries where Iraq might sell bonds, which could be seized by courts deciding cases put forward...
...haven't plaintiffs attached Iraq's oil revenues in international courts? That account is kept safe by special U.N. protections at the moment, and its currency reserves in Baghdad cannot be touched. But any move by Iraq on international capital markets involves a gamble unlikely to turn out well unless Iraq takes steps to settle the outstanding claims, an issue U.S. officials in Baghdad are stressing when talking to Iraqi policymakers in trying to shore up the nation's finances for 2010 and beyond...
...pictures as Iraq sees a revival...