Word: amara
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...latest battlefield in the long, murderous war between Iran and Iraq is a 50-mile front from Dezful in Iran across the border to the Iraqi town of Amara. There, beginning on Nov. 1, an Iranian force of about 20,000, mostly fanatical Islamic Guard units and including some basij, or groups of teen-age zealots, staged a new offensive. Attacking at night to neutralize Iraq's overwhelming air superiority, and sticking to the high, steep terrain that favors Iranian manpower over Iraqi firepower, they claim to have captured 210 sq. mi. of territory, killing 6,100 Iraqi defenders...
Having scored that victory, the Iranians went no farther. Nor are they likely to. The reason: the broad, flat plain between the border and Amara is a maze of earthen walls and slit trenches. Hundreds upon hundreds of Soviet-built Iraqi tanks, armored personnel carriers, guns and rocket launchers dot the eerie landscape, each hunkered down behind its own earth revetment. If the Iranians attempted to move toward Amara, they would invite the same decimation that they received in five full-scale attacks last summer, when wave upon wave of poorly trained Islamic Guards rushed across the flood plain...
Iranian armed forces are poised for an assault at three points along the Iraqi border: in the south, where the reconnaissance information indicates that Iranian troops are concentrated near the port of Basra, the site of Iraq's major oil production facilities; in the center, near Amara, where Iranian troops are solidly entrenched within 200 miles of Baghdad, the Iraqi capital; and in the north, where Ayatullah Ruhollah Khomeini has persuaded Kurdish dissidents to foment new trouble for the regime of President Saddam Hussein. In Tehran last week, Iran's Defense Minister, Mohammed Salimi, sounded a clear...
Even professional planners are learning (from bruising themselves on the future's impenetrable surface) to put only qualified belief in their own findings. Says Roy Amara, president of the Institute for the Future in Menlo Park, Calif.: "Anything that you forecast is by definition uncertain." Thomas J. Watson, founder of IBM, would surely have agreed, and perhaps not too long after forecasting "I think there is a world market for about five computers." Leon Eplan, ex-president of the American Institute of Planners and now chairman of the city planning department at the Georgia Institute of Technology, says that...