Joint Security Station Thrasher, in the western Baghdad suburb of Ghazaliya, is housed in a Saddam-era mansion with twenty-foot columns and a fountain, now dry, that looks like a layer cake of concrete and limestone.
Mr. Sadr complained that the inquiry had already gone too far, with arrests of more than 200 of the group's followers "in a Saddam-style measure," Mr. Sadr's statement said.
Among the many blessings Dr. Kissinger sees in a Saddam-free Iraq, he even offers some consolation for possibly anxious business clients: "a better balance in oil policy within OPEC".
If you look historically, when you get rid of a Saddam in Iraq, or a Qaddafi in Libya, the place falls apart". The celebrity opinion-show hosts who drive the ratings became unbridled and unopposed.
[Page A1] In Baghdad, gunmen killed a Saddam Hussein-era official, and insurgents shot five people to death in Kirkuk, The Associated Press reported.
The second issue of their role in a post-Saddam Hussein reconstruction process or stabilisation process which would be a different matter.
Iraq has the second largest oil reserves in the world, after Saudi Arabia, and the Bush administration has made restoration of the oil industry the cornerstone for the revival of the economy in a post-Saddam Hussein Iraq.
The State Department said Thursday that it was starting a two-year program that could spend some $22 million to help provide several hundred former Iraqi weapons scientists and technicians with nonmilitary jobs in a post-Saddam Hussein Iraq to prevent them from working for countries of concern or for terrorist groups.
Or how about when Dick Cheney tried to link Saddam to Al Qaeda by referring to a meeting in Prague between Mohammed Atta and a Saddam envoy?
That in turn will strengthen the argument that in the absence of a Saddam-like strongman Iraq, with its Sunni and Shia Arabs and Sunni Kurds, can never be a coherent state and must, at best, become a loose federation.
But it is the Bushies' dream of a model kitchen in Iraq, rather than a Saddam-Qaeda link, that makes this war seem noble to them.
