Word: saddams
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...ruling parties in last Saturday's provincial election in Kurdish-controlled northern Iraq was never in doubt. The Kurdish Democratic Party (KDP) and the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK) have run the region in a virtual duopoly since 1991, when the U.S.-patrolled No-Fly Zone helped force Saddam Hussein's military out of the region. However, a new coalition, the Change List, is expected to make gains in the election, with polls showing that it could capture as much as a quarter of the vote. This represents the first significant challenge to the ruling parties in the region...
...years since the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq in 2003, Kurdistan has been relatively peaceful compared with the rest of the country, in large part owing to its ruling parties, which began as guerrilla groups fighting Saddam's genocidal campaign against the ethnic Kurdish minority. After Saddam's downfall, the two parties put aside their differences - the KDP is a tribal-style organization dominated by the Barzani family, and the PUK is a socialist-like group run by a party cadre led by Jalal Talabani - to present a united Kurdish front in negotiations with Arab Iraqis and the U.S. over...
...increasingly available to all Kurds. Booming foreign investment has created a business culture complete with plans for a golf course as part of a gated-community outside the capital city of Erbil. There have been no U.S. combat fatalities in the autonomous Kurdish region since the fall of Saddam Hussein, in 2003. But there's one thing the Kurdish Regional Government (KRG) can no longer lord over the struggling central government in Baghdad: democracy...
...that word assassination. I found out the weight of the term in Washington when I was still in the CIA. In the spring of 1995 I was in charge of a small unit in northern Iraq. It was a time when it appeared that with only a little push, Saddam Hussein would fall. There were plans for a military coup, which were quickly twisted into rumors of a plan to assassinate Saddam. The Clinton White House picked up the assassination part and called the CIA to check. My team and I were pulled back to Washington. The FBI investigated, decided...
...prohibiting assassination, and in 1981 Ronald Reagan amended it as Executive Order 12333. In the CIA, that was the closest thing we had to the Ten Commandments. So I can imagine the sensitivities in the Clinton White House when it heard rumors that the CIA was planning to assassinate Saddam. It did not want to face the furor that would follow a failed attempt to kill anyone.(Read "Should Panetta Have Disclosed the CIA Secret Program...