Word: iraqi
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...along with E-3 and RC-135 command planes and KC-135 tankers to keep them safely flying and fueled. An hour later, in a delicately choreographed ballet 400 miles east, the warplanes take their final sips of gas before turning south toward Iraq. Their mission: to show the Iraqi military how impotent Saddam is in protecting Iraqi sovereignty--and them. Maybe this will foment rebellion...
Lieut. Colonel Vincent DiFronzo, an F-15 pilot, says the Iraqi missiles and artillery are getting closer to hitting U.S. warplanes, which fly at more than 20,000 ft. to avoid Iraqi fire. "They're making adjustments that allow them to cover more altitude," he says. The Iraqis fire usually with no electronic guidance, which would sound an alarm in U.S. cockpits. Often the only alert pilots have is the silent pop of charcoal-gray puffs of smoke from exploding artillery hundreds or thousands of feet below. U.S. pilots say they attack only after Iraqi forces threaten them...
Success and failure are harder to measure on the second front. A TIME investigation found that little if any of the $8 million Congress has already appropriated (in Economic Support Funds, separate from the Liberation Act money) to oust Saddam has ended up directly in the hands of Iraqi opposition groups. Rather, Capitol Hill investigators complain, much of the money has gone to high-priced public relations experts and consultants. A somewhat less than ferocious outfit called Quality Support Inc., of Springfield, Va., for example, has received $3.1 million to book hotel rooms, airline tickets and conference halls for opposition...
Money has gone to other projects that have little to do with overthrowing the Baghdad regime. The Middle East Institute in Washington is receiving $255,738 to host "thematic conferences" on what kind of government Iraqis should establish after Saddam's downfall. An additional $200,000 has been budgeted for an environmental study of Iraq's southern marshlands. "It's all just nonsense," says Francis Brooke, Washington representative of the Iraqi National Congress...
...which secretly plotted against Saddam before Clinton went public, is still picking up the pieces of its shattered operation. More than five years ago, the agency poured millions of dollars into a guerrilla force of the I.N.C., a loose coalition of Iraqi exile groups led by Ahmed Chalabi, a wealthy Iraqi Shi'ite and skillful political organizer. But with the White House nervous about being sucked into a contra-style insurgency war, the CIA pulled the plug on its support for Chalabi's guerrillas and turned to Iraqi officers in Saddam's inner circle who might topple him. That ended...