Word: saddamism
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Even as the opposition leaders pleaded for outside support for the rebellion against Saddam, their bickering underscored just why such backing has not materialized: with no coherent leadership at its head, the uprising was a prescription for Iraq's unraveling. Thus the U.S. and its allies preferred to remain spectators to the insurrection. They continued to hope for a straightforward coup that would replace Saddam with a member of his establishment flexible enough to reconcile with the allies but steely enough to hold the fraying country intact. "Iraq is a violent political culture," said a senior State Department official...
...second week the revolt against Saddam staggered but stayed alive. In the south, the heartland of Iraq's Shi'ite majority, which has long been dominated by the minority Sunnis, loyalist troops were able to quiet Basra and other restive cities, but only temporarily. As soon as they moved on to other rebellious spots, trouble erupted again "like fire under peat," as a Western diplomat in Riyadh...
...assertion that they controlled 75% of Kurdish Iraq. "If we believed everything they said, we would already be witnessing a Kurdish republic," said the diplomat in Riyadh. Still, it was clear the Kurds were putting up a good fight. The unrest even infected Shi'ite neighborhoods in Baghdad. Saddam's government itself acknowledged in a newspaper report that Iraq faced "the gravest conspiracy in its contemporary history...
...them from utility poles and the gun barrels of tanks. Insurgents in the north claimed the army had taken 5,000 Kurdish women and children hostage and was threatening to kill them. Tehran maintained that 30 Iraqis who had fled to Iran were the victims of napalm attacks by Saddam's troops...
...Beirut opposition leaders insisted they had a plan to forestall all this. After Saddam's overthrow, they said, popular elections would determine who would rule Iraq. But that was quite a change of heart for the radical Shi'ites, whose aim had always been to create an Islamic regime. "We would like the people to elect us to implement it," explained Abu Bilal al Adib of the al-Dawa party, a sometime sponsor of terrorism. Another Shi'ite representative declared the verbal obeisance to democracy irrelevant. "It is the motivated minority that counts," said he, "and the Islamic movement...