Word: shying
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...secret talks with U.S. officials, Iraqi Shi'ite Muslim opposition leaders have been told that Saddam Hussein could be replaced by a pro-West military junta sometime this summer. The prospect has prompted some Shi'ites to discard their historic anti-U.S. stance in the hope of taking part in a power-sharing arrangement with a future military regime. "We can get on with the Americans," asserts a European-based opposition leader. "We worked closely with the Russians for 40 years. What did it get us? Garbage: antiquated weapons, outdated industrial goods and a lame economy...
Iraqi opposition leaders say the Saudis are working on a secret deal to help overthrow Saddam Hussein. Makeshift camps have been set up near Saudi and Kuwaiti border towns for thousands of Shi'ite refugees. While the world's attention is focused on the tragedy of the Kurds, Saudi Crown Prince Abdullah has agreed in principle to let anti-Saddam Iraqis, mostly Sunni and Shi'ite Muslims, set up training sites as a base for infiltrating Iraq. The Saudis are "much more committed to overthrowing Saddam Hussein than the allies are," says Muwafaq al-Rubai of the Shi...
Turkish authorities say they have been overwhelmed by the sheer mass of refugees. The total number of northern Kurds and southern Shi'ites fleeing toward Iran or Turkey is estimated at almost 2 million. Many, like the 200,000 or so on the mountaintops around Turkish Hakkari, can be reached only by dirt roads often made impassable by mud. "We can send aid only on mules," says a Turkish official...
Officials of both international relief organizations and governments insist that the greatest imaginable humanitarian assistance can only be a temporary palliative for the pain suffered by refugees in hordes as vast as those of the Kurds and Shi'ites. In the long run, officials say, there must be a political solution that would make it possible for the refugees either to return to their homes or to find some place where they can settle permanently...
...That would have turned very quickly into full- scale fighting." And then to extricate its own troops the U.S. would have become involved in deciding who should govern Iraq, a treacherous choice in the best of times. Organizing a government that could keep the country together among rival Kurds, Shi'ites and Sunni Muslims would have presented as formidable a task as all those doomed attempts, starting in 1963 and continuing for a decade or so, to devise a Vietnamese government that could win popular support...