Politics
Saddam Hussein launched the multi-billion-dollar subway project in 1983 to alleviate traffic congestion in Baghdad's streets. During the Iran-Iraq war the subway project was halted.
At a December 2002 press conference, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld spoke of "enormous miles and miles and miles of underground tunneling" that prevented the United Nations from properly inspecting Saddam's WMD stocks. Hussein al-Shahristani, a scientist imprisoned by Saddam, told CBS' "60 Minutes" that "We believe now it is more than 100 kilometers of very complex network, multilayer tunnels."
Read more about this topic: Baghdad Metro
Famous quotes containing the word politics:
“There is a place where we are always alone with our own mortality, where we must simply have something greater than ourselves to hold onto—God or history or politics or literature or a belief in the healing power of love, or even righteous anger.... A reason to believe, a way to take the world by the throat and insist that there is more to this life than we have ever imagined.”
—Dorothy Allison (b. 1949)
“It is not so much that women have a different point of view in politics as that they give a different emphasis. And this is vastly important, for politics is so largely a matter of emphasis.”
—Crystal Eastman (1881–1928)
“All is politics in this capital.”
—Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826)