John Barry

The woman claimed to be Saddam Hussein's former mistress. Last September, on ABC's "Primetime Thursday," she described the Iraqi strongman as a Viagra enthusiast who enjoyed listening to recordings of Frank Sinatra singing "Strangers in the Night," as well as to tapes of torture victims crying for mercy.

Will George Bush press the button for war Monday, Jan. 27, the day U.N. inspectors in Iraq make their initial report? Not likely. Even Britain would be hard pressed to go along if he did.

We need more actionable intelligence," chief U.N. weapons inspector Hans Blix repeated last week, appealing for help from--especially--America. Blix complains that Washington has been slow to pass evidence or leads on Saddam Hussein's forbidden weapons programs to his inspection teams.

Call it a bad case of cold feet. To fight a war against Saddam Hussein, Washington needs Turkey's help. At the least, it wants access to air bases along Iraq's northern border.

Brazil: Lula's Looking GoodAs soon as Brazilian President Luiz Inacio (Lula) da Silva was sworn in on Jan. 1, the world worried that his leftist leadership would send Brazil down the path of neighboring Argentina.

Turkey's hesitation to allow U.S. troops to use its soil as a springboard for an invasion of Iraq has "stunned" the Bush administration, a senior U.S. official told NEWSWEEK.

The consensus among George W. Bush's advisers is that America must do a better job of making friends. Millions of Muslims view America as corrupt, brutal and arrogant, indifferent if not outright hostile to Islamic concerns.

The official logo of the information Awareness Office, the Pentagon's secretive new terrorist-detection experiment, isn't subtle. A picture of the globe, under the watchful gaze of that spooky pyramid on the dollar bill, the one with the all-seeing eye of God at the top.

As he walked his younger daughter Anne Marie down the aisle for her wedding on Nov. 2, Secretary of State Colin Powell had a double reason to rejoice. Even as the bridal party drove to the church in rural Maryland, Powell was on his secure satphone talking with French Foreign Minister Dominique de Villepin.

When the U.S. Army recently gave Robert Clifford an order for another of his giant, high-speed catamarans, he was overjoyed. Clifford's company in Hobart, Australia, Incat, had been overstocked with the hydrofoils, which can cut through the waves at 55mph.

The United Nations will send a forensics team to a mass grave at Dasht-e Leili in north Afghanistan where hundreds of captured Taliban were buried last December after suffocating in airless container trucks en route to prison (NEWSWEEK, Aug. 26).

It was, in sheer scale, "the greatest cavalry charge in American history," wrote one military historian. The four-day, 250-mile sprint of the 24th Mechanized Division around the western flank of Saddam Hussein's Army in the 1991 gulf war was a dashing feat of arms, a show of American can-do spirit and ability.

It is the question of the moment: should the United States invade Iraq and oust Saddam Hussein? President George W. Bush urgently argues Saddam is a madman in possession of a massive stockpile of chemical and biological weapons--an arsenal he could turn loose on us or our allies, or use to arm our enemies.

Witness Reports And The Probing Of A Mass Grave Point To War Crimes. Does The United States Have Any Responsibility For The Atrocities Of Its Allies? A Newsweek Investigation.

While still wrangling over how to overthrow Iraq's Saddam Hussein, the Bush administration is already looking for other targets. President Bush has called for the ouster of Palestinian leader Yasir Arafat.

The "Future Of Iraq Project" is holding its second two-day working session this week at the State Department. Participants will enthusiastically sketch out their plans for running Iraq after Saddam Hussein is gone.

When 32-year-old Jennifer Wright went missing in late June, her husband, William, told neighbors he knew what had happened: she'd run off with a friend. An Army Special Forces master sergeant stationed at Fort Bragg, N.C., he'd recently returned from a tour of duty in Afghanistan, and his marriage was showing signs of strain.

Alarmed at the deteriorating security situation in Afghanistan and the slow pace of international aid, top Bush administration officials are reviewing U.S. policy. "We have talked about needing an 'exit strategy,' but the real challenge is to have a 'success strategy'," said one policymaker.

Does the United States have the skull of one of Osama bin Laden's lieutenants, or even bin Laden himself? If not, why the mystery about what we have found?

George W. Bush never served in Congress, and he doesn't feel especially at home around rank-and-file members. When he wants to charm or scold Capitol Hill, he tends to call on House and Senate leaders and let them spread the word.

The military brass have warned that their forces are stretched thin, and worry about a long stay in Afghanistan, or a Mideast peacekeeping mission. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld insisted last month that talk of U.S. forces' being "overextended and exhausted" was "a fundamental misunderstanding." But in a memo to the service secretaries two weeks earlier, on March 13, Rumsfeld said: "The entire force is facing the adverse results of the high-paced optempo and perstempo" (the number of...

As he waited in his breezeway to greet Crown Prince Abdullah, George W. Bush should have been relaxed, or at least able to fake it. He was in his favorite spot: his ranch in Crawford, Texas.

Dr. Stephen Younger is a mild-mannered, slightly bookish federal bureaucrat unknown to the general public. But as much as any other government official, he is the man charged with worrying about how to head off the next terrorist attack.

Is George W. Bush using war as an extension of his oil policy? It looked that way in February, when Washington announced a $700 million aid package for the Andean region, largely to fight the twin threats of guerrilla war and drugrunning that threaten the area.

If this weekend's Anglo-American summit in Crawford, Texas, is anything like the lovefest that most people expect it to be, some credit has got to go to a 49-year-old Scottish rugby player-turned-oil and gasman named Bill Gammell.

Rhetoric aside, "axis of evil" doesn't mean much. Iraq and Iran are bitter enemies--they fought each other in the bloodiest war of the 1980s--and North Korea has little in common with either of them.

The biggest applause line in President Bush's State of the Union speech tonight? Don't even ask. We already know it: that made-for-television moment when Bush, having lauded the skill and bravery of American soldiers and fliers in Afghanistan, turns to the gallery and gestures for Hamid Karzai, new boss of that liberated ruin, to stand and take his bow.

Victory, as the ancient Greeks said, has a thousand fathers, and the scramble is already on to claim paternity for Operation Crescent Wind, the innovative air campaign that broke the Taliban's rule over Afghanistan in two months flat.

Victory, as the ancient Greeks said, has a thousand fathers, and the scramble is already on to claim paternity for Operation Crescent Wind, the air campaign that broke the Taliban's rule over Afghanistan in two months flat.

Saddam Hussein lives for vengeance. But in 2002 the Iraqi dictator, who haunted the '90s, could well get a taste of someone else's wrath. And for President George W.