Word: saddamism
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...needs smaller armies to invade targeted countries, it needs bigger armies to occupy them when the shooting stops. The challenges in post-Saddam Iraq have caught the Pentagon literally off guard. Bush officials predicted that G.I.s would be welcomed as heroes in the streets of Baghdad. "Like the people of France in the 1940s, they view us as their hoped-for liberator," said Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz a week before the war began. As late as May, the Pentagon predicted that U.S. troop levels would fall to 30,000 by September. Today there are 140,000 U.S. troops...
...Baghdad bomb was the deadliest attack yet on foreign nationals since a U.S.-led force overthrew the regime of Saddam Hussein in the spring. In Washington, some officials tried to frame the episode as a turning point that would ultimately bolster their cause. The bombing, said a senior adviser to President George W. Bush, "will go down as the defining moment in the war on terror. It's the civilized world vs. those who know no bounds of decency. I'm not trying to put a gloss on a bad day, but this was a desperate reaction to the real...
That view may be honestly held. In much of Iraq, life is slowly improving (though three British soldiers were killed in Basra on Saturday), and coalition forces continue to pick up leaders of Saddam's regime. Last week Ali Hassan al-Majid, known as "Chemical Ali" for his use of chemical weapons in northern Iraq, was taken into custody. But honesty also requires a plain admission that the audacious attempt by the Bush Administration to pacify an arc of crisis that runs from the Mediterranean to the Hindu Kush has provoked many such desperate reactions by those opposed...
...whether it had carried out the attack. In the days following the explosion, everyone from top Administration officials to Pentagon brass to the cottage industry of experts on terrorism to coffeehouse and bazaar gossips in Baghdad itself offered opinions on the perpetrators. It was Baathists; or members of Fedayeen Saddam; or the U.N.'s own security guards; or remnants of Ansar al-Islam, a terrorist group supposedly routed in the war; or al-Qaeda; or foreign jihadists who have flocked to Iraq; or a noxious combination of all the above. Treat every such opinion as if it carried a health...
...around a 500-lb. bomb. The munitions were all military grade, imported from the Soviet Union in the 1970s and '80s. Many U.S. and Iraqi officials believe that the bomb was a suicide attack (though even that is not absolutely certain), which could be telling. Baath Party and Fedayeen Saddam guerrillas have not used suicide bombs before. "It's not part of the Iraqi culture, military or political," says Mohammed Abdullah Shahwani, a retired general of the Iraqi special forces. But Ansar al-Islam, which was driven from its base at the northeastern border with Iran during the war, used...