Word: saddams
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Jundullah isn't the only case cited by those who accuse the U.S. of backing Iranian extremist groups. After the U.S. occupied Iraq in 2003, the U.S. military ostensibly disarmed the Saddam-backed Iranian militant group the Mujahedin-e Khalq (MEK) - then, as now, on the State Department's terror list - allowing it to remain in its base in Iraq, but deployed American soldiers to protect the base. The group claimed that it helped the U.S. government gather intelligence from inside Iran. Washington hawks such as House Veterans Affairs Committee chairman Representative Bob Filner (D.-Calif.) continue to call...
...strategy, with its limits on actions that risk civilian casualties, represents a sea change in U.S. military doctrine. It was only six years ago that Air Force General Richard Myers, then Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, predicted that a shock-and-awe strategy would bomb Saddam Hussein's Iraq into submission. That - and the tech-heavy force that then Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld sent into Iraq to stumble and falter for four years - hewed to the American way of war, one that was equal parts laser beams and hubris. But the military has rethought its strategy...
...Iraq's industry has gone to seed in the decades of war and sanctions, as well as the expulsion of foreign oil companies by Saddam Hussein in 1972. But its potential remains massive, especially when compared with the dwindling reserves of the North Sea, the fact that most Middle Eastern fields are already being pumped, and that new deposits elsewhere offshore and in the Arctic are remote and expensive to develop...
...winners have a cautionary tale to consider. The first foreign firm awarded a post-Saddam Hussein contract was the Chinese National Petroleum Corp. Oil began to flow six months after CNPC began work on the Ahdad field, located 90 miles south of Baghdad in Wasit province. But it involved learning to work with locals - with the community relations continuing to be volatile. (See a video of Iraq's domestic oil supply problems...
...foreign meddling. It was not just the CIA-assisted coup in 1953 against the popular democratic Prime Minister Mohammed Mossadegh, which Obama mentioned in his Cairo speech. It was also the Western support for the Shah and, worst of all in the minds of Iranians, the U.S. support for Saddam Hussein in the Iran-Iraq war of the 1980s, including the provision of chemicals that Saddam used to concoct poison gas. This remains an open wound in Iran. (See "In Tehran, Terror in Plain Clothes...