Word: iraqi
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Aside from the narration, which but for the action would be unsalvageable, the worst thing about The Specialist is that it is probably not true. Although Rivers stories about killing a Greek arms dealer, helping, he Iraqi army blow up Iranian shipping, and carrying out missions to stop the shelling of the Marines in Lebanon are plausible, someone in such a dangerous business would not say so specifically exactly what he did and to whom. The kind of detail in this book makes it unbelievable. Anyone could track down and kill the author if the details were anywhere near true...
...regimes inimical to the U.S., but they were sporadic and a number ended in failure. In the Nixon and Ford Administrations, Henry Kissinger worked through the Shah of Iran to support Kurdish separatists inside Iraq, but in 1975 the Shah pulled the plug on the Kurds in exchange for Iraqi concessions in a border dispute. When Kissinger sought to back the pro-Western factions in the Angolan civil war, he was thwarted by Congress, which was then in the throes of its post-Viet Nam withdrawal syndrome...
...latest cease-fire lasted only a few hours. Shortly after Iran announced last week that it was suspending attacks on Iraqi cities and called upon the Baghdad government to reciprocate, Iraqi warplanes attacked two tankers hauling oil from Iran's Kharg Island and launched raids on Tehran and nine other Iranian cities, killing more than 300 and wounding dozens. In retaliation, Iran fired what appeared to be another surface-to-surface missile into the heart of Baghdad; more than 70 people were reported to have died in the blast...
...that Iraq had once again used chemical weapons against its enemy. Physicians in London, Vienna, Munich and other West European cities confirmed that about 50 Iranian soldiers flown to their medical centers for treatment had been exposed to mustard gas. In Washington, Secretary of State George Shultz bluntly informed Iraqi Foreign Minister Tariq Aziz of U.S. objections to the use of chemical weapons, noting that Iraq is a signatory of the Geneva Protocol of 1925, which prohibits them...
...Western observers of the aftermath of the struggle reported that none of the dead were wearing the masks. Nor did they show signs of having been exposed to toxic agents. While denying that chemical weapons were brought to bear against the invaders, however, Major General Sultan Hashem Ahmed, an Iraqi sector commander, said, "If we had gas, we would have used...