Word: saddams
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...everywhere. In Iraq, it is both messy and dangerous. The country has now had more practice at choosing its own leaders in relatively open elections than perhaps any Middle Eastern nation besides Israel and Lebanon. In 2003, many U.S. architects of the invasion of Iraq and the removal of Saddam Hussein hoped the events would be followed by a democratic ripple effect throughout the region. That has not yet happened. The politicians who came to power after the country's first parliamentary election five years ago have been unable to resolve core issues - from deciding how to share oil revenue...
...behind it." But with a date set for the end of the American occupation, U.S. influence in Iraq is already waning. Ironically, the best proof of that is the rise, once again, of Ahmad Chalabi. The formerly exiled leader of the Iraqi National Congress - an anti-Saddam dissident group - helped the Pentagon plan the invasion of Iraq and was the candidate of U.S. neoconservatives to be the country's new leader. Chalabi fell out with the U.S. in 2004 and has reinvented himself as a Shi'ite nationalist allied with the Sadrists. As the co-head of a secretive government...
...this weekend by the defending champ, Alice in Wonderland, which has leapt like a White Rabbit past the $200 million mark in just 10 days. The Tim Burton-Johnny Depp effort is also a war movie, at least partly, but with the Red Queen and the White Queen, not Saddam Hussein and George W. Bush, as the executive adversaries. (See Alice in Wonderland through the ages...
...Green Zone, Damon plays a U.S. warrant officer who, just after the Iraq invasion, discovers that Saddam in fact had no weapons of mass destruction and fights to expose the dirty secret. No less than Inglourious Basterds, starring Damon's Ocean's Eleven buddy Brad Pitt, the film is a revisionist political fantasy disguised as gritty war reality. And given moviegoers' resistance to Iraq themes, Green Zone's trailers tried skirting the I word by making the picture seem like another Bourne adventure in all but name. There was no more hint of America's fatal foreign policy frustrations...
...stakes in Iraq's political process - domestically and regionally - are high, and reflect the absence of a consensus on both fronts. Despite their distaste for Saddam Hussein, Iraq's Arab neighbors had long looked to his regime to serve as a regional bulwark against Iranian influence in the Middle East, and supported his eight-year war against the Islamic Republic in the 1980s. The U.S. invasion removed that bulwark, and Iran has profited greatly from Iraqi democracy. The governments elected since Saddam's overthrow have been uniformly friendly toward Tehran and dominated by Shi'ite parties. While none of these...