Word: saddams
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Bush's Plan?and Saddam...
...about the same time Odierno was targeting the Baghdad beltway, he tasked his staff to find out how Saddam Hussein had defended Baghdad against the many secret cells and gangs that wanted to upend his regime. The answer came back: Saddam had always maintained a complex perimeter around Baghdad that on paper looked like a series of concentric circles. Saddam had posted his Republican Guard in various towns that ringed the capital, and inside the city, he had stationed his Special Republican Guard. If it had worked for Saddam, thought Petraeus and Odierno, it might work for them against...
...high that even he thought he might have miscalculated. But over the summer, the landscape began to change. In Baghdad, GIs moved out of their relatively safe megabases on the outskirts and into smaller bases in the city's violent neighborhoods?to live, form networks and walk patrols. Following Saddam's model, Odierno split his troops between Baghdad and the belt towns on a 3-to-2 basis: 3 soldiers inside the capital for every 2 outside the city. By the end of June, the generals began to notice that sectarian attacks were decreasing...
...Baghdad's neighborhoods. And in something of an understatement, even Petraeus calls the progress toward political reconciliation "tenuous." The largest Sunni bloc in parliament, known as the Accordance Front, walked out in August. In January, the parliament passed a measure that would extend to former Baathists and supporters of Saddam a measure of eligibility for service in the new government, which is largely controlled by Shi'ites. The move was long overdue, and no one knows whether the measure will ever be implemented; Sunnis are skeptical, and so, at times, is Washington. "We nudge. We push. We prod. We pull...
...translator, and he brought me to meet his family. Faeza, a computer engineer, had never been drawn to housework. Before the war, when she wasn't programming computers at the Baghdad airport, she was swimming laps at the élite Hunting Club. Life wasn't always good in Saddam's Iraq, but for Faeza, it was relatively easy...