Word: saddams
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...blur to you as it is to me. You, too, must be finding it hard to concentrate on the fine points of this week's news, like whether it was in questionable taste for the New York Times, in its story about the inadvertent decapitation, by noose, of Saddam Hussein's half brother, to refer to that poor ex-evildoer as the "former head" of Hussein's secret police...
...ites. But since we are groggy with antihistamines (and wouldn't mind getting rid of our own heads, the way they feel at the moment), we can suspend judgment. This thing of losing one's head may be an old Sunni gallows trick. As when Saddam - just by being so him - provoked his executioners into treating him with insufficient dignity. If you can't cheat the hangman, as the saying goes, you can at least make him look insensitive...
Sunni Iraqis have feared Persian domination since before there was an Iraq. That fear reached fever pitch after the overthrow of Saddam Hussein. Sunni politicians regularly call their Shi'ite rivals tools of Tehran. If Iraq's Shi'ite leaders want the Sunnis to end their insurgency, they'll have to seriously distance themselves from the mullahs next door. If they don't, the Baghdad government will lack influence over large chunks of the country, since even with Iran's help, Iraq's Shi'ite militias won't easily defeat a Sunni insurgency stocked with Saddam's former officers...
...movement to secede. When Baghdad and Tehran went to war in the 1980s, Iraq's Shi'ite soldiers fought fiercely, especially after Iranian forces crossed onto Iraqi soil. It's true that one major Shi'ite party, Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki's Dawa, took refuge in Iran during Saddam's rule. Another, SCIRI, was actually born there. But since entering government, leaders of both parties have carefully displayed their independence from Tehran...
...million; in the past six months, the provision of electricity has increased to up to 18 hours a day; and there are signs of a nascent economy (part of the issue is that while the coalition is helping the Iraqi government produce four times more electrical power than during Saddam Hussein's reign, the economy is demanding six times as much power...