Word: saddamism
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Think of him as a chameleon. Nouri al-Maliki, Iraq's Prime Minister, owes his survival to an ability to adapt his political persona to the prevailing circumstances. During his 24-year exile from Saddam Hussein's Iraq, he dropped his given name and went by "Jawad," to avoid detection by the dictator's spies. Returning to Baghdad in 2003, Maliki seemed no different from the legion of Shi'ite partisans who took up posts in the U.S.-installed interim government. He brought vigor and venom to his job on the committee responsible for purging the government of Saddam...
...Nouri alarms many who knew the old Jawad. Sunni and Kurdish leaders have accused him of employing tribal councils to shore up his personal standing at the expense of rivals, just as Saddam did. Vice President Adel Abdel-Mahdi, a prominent Shi'ite, has openly criticized the centralization of power in the Prime Minister's office. "We don't want another dictator in Baghdad," says Maysoon al-Damluji, a secular Member of Parliament. "It worries us all that [Maliki] is beginning to behave like a tyrant...
...they need to end Iraq's destructive sectarian politics. But at the polls, Iraqis have shown little appetite for tough guys, preferring to vote for diffuse coalitions of parties with little in common beyond sectarian identity. The cautionary tale for Maliki is Iyad Allawi, the country's first post-Saddam Prime Minister: he, too, portrayed himself as a strongman, but his secular coalition won barely 14% of the vote. "Maliki will go the same way as Allawi," says Abdel-Bari al-Zebari, a Kurdish MP. "Iraqis know that a strongman is not in their best interests...
...current Kurdish-Arab tension over ownership of northern Iraq dates back to Saddam Hussein's policies during the Iran-Iraq war of the 1980s, when his regime murdered tens of thousands of Iraqi Kurds and forcibly displaced hundreds of thousands more, resettling the territory with Iraqi Arabs from further south. After the 1991 Gulf War, the U.S. protected a Kurdish enclave in northern Iraq, and after the 2003 invasion, the Peshmerga moved down to take control of parts of Diyala, Nineveh and oil-rich Kirkuk, all of which they claim as historically Kurdish. Iraq's new constitution promised that...
...doorstep of his modest farmhouse outside Khanaqin, Mudhar Mohammed Madloum can see a Peshmerga checkpoint on one hill and an Iraqi army checkpoint barely half a mile away. Similar pairings are scattered along Diyala's contentious fault line. "The Peshmerga checkpoint has been here since the fall [of Saddam]. The Iraqi army checkpoint has been here for a few months," said Madloum. "They are not both necessary...