Word: antiaircraft
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...before he angrily resigned as Soviet Foreign Minister, Eduard Shevardnadze went out of his way to help his friend James Baker with a problem in Central America. The Secretary of State suspected that leftist guerrillas in El Salvador had acquired sophisticated Soviet SA-7 and SA-14 shoulder-held antiaircraft missiles to use against the U.S.-backed government. Baker gave his counterpart a photo of a seized launching tube, and Shevardnadze promised to investigate. In their last meeting in Houston, Shevardnadze informed Baker that the missiles were part of a shipment sent to Nicaragua in 1986. Armed with that information...
...level bombing (from as little as 200 ft.) in contrast to the high-altitude dogfighting of the first few days. Targets could include some war-related industries in northern Iraq and some command-and-control centers. But the bombing would probably be concentrated on military targets -- tank parks, antiaircraft and artillery concentrations, roads and bridges, fuel and water depots -- in southern Iraq and Kuwait. The aim would be to turn the area between Basra, a major southern command-and-control center, and the Kuwait border into a "parking lot" -- an area leveled flat, through which nothing could move...
...Iraqi antiaircraft defenses are formidable: they include hundreds of Soviet- built surface-to-air missiles and perhaps 4,000 modern antiaircraft guns. "A hundred or more lost U.S. aircraft would be a fair estimate" for this phase of the campaign, says retired Marine General Bernard Trainor. Other predictions range...
Meanwhile, the Syrians are exasperated by the aid Washington has promised Israel. For the first time the U.S. is to supply Jerusalem with Patriot missile systems, which will greatly strengthen Israel's antiaircraft defenses. Such unqualified U.S. support for Jerusalem makes Assad's alignment with Washington all the harder to sell at home. But at least one diplomat in Damascus believes Syrian authorities may be inflating their assessments of the domestic opposition to convince Washington of the need to downplay relations with Israel. Damascus has asserted that if Jerusalem gets involved in any conflagration in the region, it will quickly...
Signs of Saddam's contradictory legacy abound: housing projects only half- finished, soccer stadiums and no foreign teams to play in them, empty hotels with antiaircraft batteries on their roofs. The city is at once sinuous and Stalinesque: palm trees and concrete mausoleums with a martial theme. And everywhere the gaze of the maximum leader. Hundreds of billboard-size portraits are painted on buildings, framed in traffic circles, displayed in lobbies: Saddam drawing sword, Saddam on stallion, Saddam in sunglasses, Saddam in camouflage fatigues, Saddam looking like Xavier Cugat in white suit, Saddam slaying the infidels. In the city center...