Word: saddams
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...spring of 2003, more than a million people marched through the streets of cities across Europe and the U.S. to rail against U.S. plans to invade Iraq and oust Saddam Hussein. Amid the chants for peace was an angry accusation: the war was merely a grab by Western companies for Iraq's vast oil reserves...
...companies, among them ExxonMobil and Royal Dutch Shell, are racing to lock up multibillion-dollar deals with officials in Baghdad that will allow them to exploit the country's giant oil fields. The deals will not only allow Big Oil to return to Iraq for the first time since Saddam nationalized the industry in 1972. By modernizing a production system wrecked by conflict and embargoes, Iraq's exports could also get a huge boost, putting the country's parlous economy on firmer footing and allowing Iraq to take its place as an oil power almost equal to Saudi Arabia. (Watch...
...being there won't be easy, either, due to daunting technical and other challenges. Iraq's oil industry has limped along for years on creaking old equipment, patchwork pipeline networks and decayed, rusted port facilities; Saddam-era sanctions largely prevented the industry from upgrading to state-of-the-art equipment. The country produces just 2.5 million barrels a day, down from 2.8 million barrels before the U.S. invasion and a sharp drop from its high of 3.7 million barrels in 1979, when Saddam boosted production to finance his calamitous war with neighboring Iran. A government adviser recently told Britain...
...Tehran certainly has the tools to make trouble. The Quds Force, an élite unit of Iran's Revolutionary Guards, was able to stir up sectarian tension in Iraq after the fall of Saddam Hussein by helping arm and finance the Shi'ite militias that first fought against the U.S.-led coalition and then conducting a campaign of violence against Sunni Iraqis. The commander of the Quds Force, Brigadier General Qassem Suleimani, is also credited with reining in the Shi'ite militias in 2007 - a key factor in helping the U.S. surge strategy succeed...
...President Barack Obama's position on Iran and has praised him for fostering diplomacy with the country. But he has also said that he doesn't plan to be as outspoken as his predecessor: the outgoing ElBaradei famously clashed with the Bush Administration over its claims that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction in the run-up to the U.S. invasion of Iraq. (See TIME's 10 Questions interview with Mohamed ElBaradei...