Word: saddamism
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Does this mean that the attacks on U.S. soldiers every day, the roadside bombs and downtown ambushes and mortars fired at headquarters would die away? There never was good evidence that Saddam was controlling the insurgency, and the circumstances in which he was found--hiding in a hole, accompanied by an entourage of only two--suggest he was too isolated to play any central role. However, his arrest could still profoundly rattle the resistance. The Pentagon estimated that nine of 10 insurgents were former regime loyalists. To the extent they were driven by a rational agenda--restoring the old regime...
There are practical reasons to think Saddam's capture may help quell the resistance. For one thing, even if Saddam's leadership was not central to the insurgency, his money likely was. Many of the resistance fighters the U.S. has picked up were essentially mercenaries, former criminals or jobless men who were paid to strike U.S. forces. His arrest increases the chance that Iraqis will feel safe to turn in other insurgents, as happened after the siege that ended in the deaths of Uday and and Qusay...
There remains, however, the resistance fighters who have no loyalty to Saddam but fight for other, larger causes. They will likely be affected in different ways: the jihadis are not known to have yet established in Iraq their own infrastructure for fighting. Rather, they are thought to have joined up with Baathists, who can provide them the intelligence, the money, the munitions and the vehicles to deliver them in their attacks. To the extent the Baathists are hurt, they may be hurt...
...same time, no one is expecting the conflict to end abruptly, especially the military commanders who work out of one of Saddam's ornate palaces overlooking the Tigris River in Tikrit. "We expect a spike in enemy activity," says Captain Mitch Carlisle. "We're more focused on alert than ever. We're not letting our guard down...
...news meant that the man George Bush vowed to hunt down was now at his mercy, and so he has choices to make. He could declare victory and go home, but nothing in his reflexes or rhetoric suggests that, having placed Saddam in a cage, he is inclined to leave his other promises unfulfilled. And so the latest in the series of tests of a President's instincts and motives comes to this: Does he trust the people he says he went to war to free to do the right thing? If a sense of justice is the necessary rock...