Word: saddamism
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...because the biggest obstacles to killing Saddam aren't moral or legal but practical. It's not smart for the U.S., which has a huge stake in world order, to be seen as resorting to a little terror of its own. Unintended consequences often flow from clever plans. Recall Pan Am 103, blown out of the sky allegedly by Libyan agents after Gaddafi almost died from Reagan's bombs...
...Saddam remains one of the world's most difficult targets. He moves constantly, uses doubles, runs his food through chemical analyzers, kills close associates and even his in-laws to keep others off guard, and employs a ruthlessly loyal security force that has quashed multiple coup attempts since 1991. Richard Haass, who directed Middle Eastern affairs at the National Security Council during the Gulf War, says, "I have yet to see anything remotely persuasive about how you could take out Saddam. A wish is not a policy." One suggestion: million-dollar rewards have helped the U.S. catch foreign terrorists...
...Saddam Hussein's unwatched arsenal of poisons and germs can redouble the threat to America, and the terrorists are already among us. That message fairly screamed at Americans last week. In the shadow of the World Trade Center, the target of a bombing in 1993, New York City began the week with a drill involving 600 police, fire fighters and FBI agents responding to a mock attack by terrorists supposedly using deadly VX nerve gas, which Iraq has produced in vast quantities. The following day, in Fairfax, Va., a jury convicted Mir Aimal Kasi, a Pakistani, of assassinating...
Officials in Washington are deeply worried about what some of them call "strategic crime." By that they mean the merging of the output from a government's arsenals, like Saddam's biological weapons, with a group of semi-independent terrorists, like radical Islamist groups, who might slip such bioweapons into the U.S. and use them. It wouldn't take much. This is the poor man's atom bomb. A gram of anthrax culture contains a trillion spores, theoretically enough for 100 million fatal doses. The stuff can be spread into the air with backpack sprayers or even perfume atomizers...
...gulf, the CIA was eyeing the bioweapons threat apprehensively. In a now declassified study sent to the White House in September 1990, the agency warned that Iraq could use "special forces, civilian-government agents or foreign terrorists to hand-deliver biological or chemical agents clandestinely." Saddam would hardly produce such weapons if he never intended to use them. And when might he unleash them? The CIA thought it would be when he felt his survival was in danger. "He would want to take as many of his enemies with him as he could," the agency predicted...