Word: saddams
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...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...
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...