Word: shying
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...height of the fighting for Basra, Western intelligence officials say, some 5,000 defectors from the regular army, angered that their leaders had brought them such inglorious defeat, faced 6,000 loyalists from the Republican Guard. The rabble-rousers also included a large number of Shi'ite fundamentalists, some of whom paraded portraits of Mohammed Bakr Hakim, Iraq's leading Shi'ite cleric. Hakim lives in exile in Iran and aims to install a Tehran-like revolutionary government in Baghdad; Iran's President Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani last week called on Saddam's regime to "surrender to the will...
...witnesses to a coming bloodbath. Opposition leaders were terrified that Saddam would use chemical weapons against his own people once again. U.S. officials last week warned Iraqi diplomats in Washington and New York against such action. The diplomats said their government had no intention of using gas, but one Shi'ite leader claimed it had already been used...
...even if the allies had had the freedom to maneuver, they lacked the will. "I'm not sure," said Cheney, "whose side you'd want to be on." Not the Shi'ite mullahs, certainly. The West has no interest in seeing Iran II in Iraq; nor do the gulf states, which have their own problems with Shi'ite restiveness. Supporting the Kurds would create a stewpot of problems as well. Turkey, an important constituent in the anti-Saddam team and a NATO member, fears that any gains made by Iraq's Kurds would embolden Turkey's own 8 million-member...
...uprisings succeed, Iraq could find itself dismembered, with the Kurds running the north, the Shi'ites the south, and Saddam's Sunni faction relegated to the strip in between. That in turn might invite neighboring Turkey, Syria and Iran to take a bite out of the country. Thus the Lebanonization of Iraq would become part of the unhappy legacy of foreign involvement in the Middle East, a result the West is anxious to avoid...
...backing for the uprisings, in part by playing down the threat of partition. The Joint Action Committee, an umbrella group linking 17 disparate organizations, asserted that its members were united in wanting a democratic, unified Iraq -- though many of them want no such thing. The association, which includes several Shi'ite and Kurdish groups, communists, Sunni nationalists and pro-Syrian Baathists, is riven with strife...