Word: shying
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Alternatively, Iraq might sink into a long-running, multisided civil war, like Lebanon -- and "Lebanon" now rivals "Vietnam" as a one-word summation of the Administration's worst nightmares. The Kurds and Shi'ites, says a Bush adviser, were "fighting the Sunnis for years before we got there, and they'll continue killing each other long after we've gone." U.S. forces, moreover, might not be able to stay out of such a bloody quagmire. Having helped depose Saddam, Washington might be obliged to get involved in selecting and propping up a successor government. But the U.S., observes an Administration...
...effect, by not helping the rebels fighting to oust the archdemon. Bush, after all, denounced the Iraqi dictator as being in some respects "worse than Hitler," organized a multinational crusade to crush his military power and repeatedly called for his overthrow. For the past four weeks, Shi'ite Muslims in the south and Kurds in the north have been trying to accomplish just that. Yet after Bush met with his top national security advisers last week, the President made it clear that U.S. military forces now occupying southern Iraq will give no overt assistance to the rebels...
That decision, moreover, was made in full knowledge that Saddam is likely not just to defeat the insurrections but to massacre their supporters by the thousands. That is already happening in the south, where Saddam loyalists reportedly have regained control of nearly all the towns once captured by the Shi'ites and are taking a fearsome revenge. Refugees by the thousands have fled across the American lines, seeking succor and narrating tales of torture and mass executions...
Today, however, things are looking grim. Saddam Hussein's forces have crushed most of the Shi'ite and Kurdish bellions with brutal force (including, of course, chemical weapons, at the cost of thousands of lives). Once solidly restored to his former control, it would be naive to expect Saddam to refrain from purchasing arms, and more than naive to think it impossible because of some "embargo" which everyone knows won't last...
OVER SPRING BREAK in London, a friend of mine met an Iraqi student (a Shi'ite from the holy city of Karbala) who described watching the secret police take his parents away in the middle of the night. They were kept imprisoned for years, during which he didn't know whether they were dead or alive...