Word: saddamism
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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First, Annan sent a letter that offered Saddam not just an out but a win: a nice reward--broad hints of accelerating the move to lift the economic embargo of Iraq--if Saddam would just act nice. Saddam responded with his "Swiss cheese" letter, a disingenuous, heavily hedged show of compliance with U.N. demands that was, in fact, a prescription for more Iraqi "cheat and retreat" on weapons inspections. Nonetheless, the very transmittal of that letter, as yet unparsed, was enough to prompt President Clinton to recall his bombers in midflight...
...nothing of the sort. But once the U.N. said so, Iraq's Big Power friends (Russia, China and France) and brother Arab states, which just days before had blamed the military showdown squarely on Saddam, could hardly say anything less...
Then, to make U.S. action all the more impossible, a third bit of mischief: as soon as Annan received Saddam's letter, he announced that he would be returning U.N. humanitarian workers to Baghdad within a day. Doing so would effectively end the American threat, however "poised" for action the Administration claimed to be. It is one thing to bomb an enemy capital. It is another to bomb an enemy capital where U.N. humanitarian workers are flitting about doing their good works...
Within six days of the crisis' resolution, its farcicality became obvious when Iraq contemptuously refused to turn over promised documents to the U.N. inspectors. But no matter. The moment had passed. Saddam had his reprieve...
...serious topic in the Pentagon tank, the top-secret meeting room in which the Joint Chiefs of Staff plot strategy. In fact, Marine General Anthony Zinni, who as chief of the U.S. Central Command would oversee any U.S.-led attack on Iraq, thinks it's a dubious scheme. "Saddam contained," he says, "is far better than an Iraq that implodes or explodes and ends up like an Afghanistan or a Somalia...