Word: saddams
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...exiles fly to a Florida Air Force base this week for 12 days of classes on the role of the military in developing democracies. The four have been told to wear casual civilian clothes. It is clear that the White House hopes that if military power can't oust Saddam, maybe these insurgents can. Others see the training in a different light. "It's lame," says Democratic Senator Joseph Lieberman. "It's obviously not what Congress intended them to do with that money...
Success and failure are harder to measure on the second front. A TIME investigation found that little if any of the $8 million Congress has already appropriated (in Economic Support Funds, separate from the Liberation Act money) to oust Saddam has ended up directly in the hands of Iraqi opposition groups. Rather, Capitol Hill investigators complain, much of the money has gone to high-priced public relations experts and consultants. A somewhat less than ferocious outfit called Quality Support Inc., of Springfield, Va., for example, has received $3.1 million to book hotel rooms, airline tickets and conference halls for opposition...
Money has gone to other projects that have little to do with overthrowing the Baghdad regime. The Middle East Institute in Washington is receiving $255,738 to host "thematic conferences" on what kind of government Iraqis should establish after Saddam's downfall. An additional $200,000 has been budgeted for an environmental study of Iraq's southern marshlands. "It's all just nonsense," says Francis Brooke, Washington representative of the Iraqi National Congress...
...which secretly plotted against Saddam before Clinton went public, is still picking up the pieces of its shattered operation. More than five years ago, the agency poured millions of dollars into a guerrilla force of the I.N.C., a loose coalition of Iraqi exile groups led by Ahmed Chalabi, a wealthy Iraqi Shi'ite and skillful political organizer. But with the White House nervous about being sucked into a contra-style insurgency war, the CIA pulled the plug on its support for Chalabi's guerrillas and turned to Iraqi officers in Saddam's inner circle who might topple him. That ended...
Operation Northern Watch, the U.S.-led effort to keep the skies over northern Iraq clear of Iraqi warplanes, is the strangest of wars. It is not being waged according to Pentagon doctrine. It lacks a clear, attainable objective and forfeits the initiative to Saddam. And it doesn't make traditional military sense. Risking the lives of your pilots to destroy an opponent's air-defense network makes sense only when such risky missions precede an aerial invasion...