Word: saddamism
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...other designated "evildoers," North Korea and Iran. Not only that, these epic gains would have been achieved on the basis of minimal investment of American lives and treasure - the war in Afghanistan won from the air and the peace requiring no more than a handful of U.S. troops; Saddam's legions defeated by three mobile U.S. armored divisions who could then pack up and go home leaving handpicked Iraqi exiles to tap ballooning oil revenues and build the Arab world's first pro-U.S., pro-Israel democracy...
...there's mounting evidence that Iran and North Korea have taken the opposite lesson to the one intended by the Bush Administration. Rather than backing away from weapons of mass destruction, both may instead have accelerated their quest for nuclear weapons so as to avoid going the way of Saddam. North Korea swears it already has them, and Washington faces few good policy options as it goes into six-way talks on the issue later this month. Iran denies it, but there is mounting evidence that Tehran is using the cover of its civilian nuclear energy program...
...from being chastened by what was found in Iraq after Saddam's ouster, the antiwar Europeans are feeling quietly vindicated by the absence of any evidence of an immediate weapons-of-mass-destruction threat, and it's Blair who finds himself in deep political trouble. Washington has little financial and military support for its postwar mission among the most capable nations as long as it insists on unilateral control. In the two years of the war on terrorism, U.S. influence over allied nations appears to have waned rather than waxed...
...number of quite distinct forces. Remnants of the regime's security and intelligence services certainly play a major part, and Bremer's decision to summarily dissolve the Iraqi army and the Interior Ministry may have swelled the ranks of those willing to fight on. Secret documents reportedly issued by Saddam's security services shortly before the war instructed operatives to join up with Islamic resistance organizations once the regime fell. Numbering up to 50,000, such operatives clearly have extensive paramilitary and organizational training, and access to funds and weapons. But they are by no means the only game...
...their activity is confined to a relatively small pocket of territory stretching northward from Baghdad - the "Sunni triangle." The insurgency may find significant communal support among Sunnis, but its growth potential remains distinctly limited without participation from the Shiite majority. The Shiites were the brutally oppressed underclass of Saddam's Iraq, and they are deeply hostile to the Baathists. They also, however, remain for the most part suspicious of the U.S., and the firebrand young cleric Moqtada al-Sadr is making confrontation with the occupiers the centerpiece of his own bid for power among the Shiites. Sadr supporters have engaged...