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| | TIME.com -- Tony Karon: Meet Iraq's New Strongman |
 | | That could leave Washington with the uncomfortable choice it faces in respect of most of its other "strongman" allies in the Arab world either throwing in its lot with a predictable and friendly authoritarian, or else abandoning him and risking the emergence of a hostile regime, or chaos, or both. |
 | | The reason the CIA had Allawi on its payroll in the first place during the 1990s was that he was the point man for efforts to have Saddam Hussein overthrown by his own generals. |
 | | A kind of Baathism without Saddam, in other words, its premise being that holding Iraq together required a strongman regime, but that such a strongman ought to be a relatively enlightened, pro-Western modernizer rather than an erratic sociopath like Saddam and his sons. |
| www.time.com /time/columnist/karon/article/0,9565,661521,00.html (1323 words) |
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