Word: awe
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...optimistic scenario for a quick and relatively painless victory over Saddam's forces appears to be receding, as the "shock-and-awe" concept gives way to a more conventional contest of division-strength armored formations. Despite Iraqi resistance, it's a showdown that can only have one outcome - but what may well be decided in the coming days is the time-frame and human cost of regime-change in Iraq...
...Saddam Hussein's forces have survived the "shock and awe" phase designed to obliterate their will to resist, and they're putting up a fight. That's good news for the Iraqi dictator, and he seized the propaganda moment with a TV broadcast hailing the resistance of his forces and urging them on. Still, the duration of their resistance of his regime may be determined by the outcome of the battle beginning on the southern approaches to Baghdad, as the U.S. Third Infantry Division comes face to face with the Medina Division of Iraq's Republican Guard...
...Shock and awe" had been designed to decapitate the regime and remove its will, and ability to mount a coherent defense. That, coalition commanders had hoped, would spur mass-scale surrender and even the internal collapse of the regime with minimal loss of life. Saddam has planned all along on forcing the coalition to fight a bloody battle for Baghdad, believing that the spectacle of mass civilian deaths and significant military casualties on the coalition side would raise political pressure on President Bush to accept something short of complete victory. As implausible as that scenario...
...with his pocked skin and petite size, still commands awe with his stunts. On an apartment-house roof, he declines to take the elevator to the ground floor; he drops down the side of the building, one floor at a time, by grabbing onto successive balcony ledges. Later, he disarms an opponent with the fancy footwork he's displayed since his days as a People's Republic teen idol; it's the look-Mao-no-hands routine, in which he does a soft-shoe number on a bad guy's belly. Finally, Li has a face-off against another champion...
...battle has been completely joined. Baghdad was pulverized by U.S. Friday, the first installment of the promised "shock-and-awe" air campaign that U.S. commanders had held off on for the past 48 hours, and ground troops advanced deep into Iraq. At the same time, U.S. and British ground forces moved into southern and central Iraq, having seized Iraq's only deep-water port at Umm Qasr and begun fighting for control of Basra, the capital of Shiite southern Iraq. Air strikes have also blasted targets in the key northern cities of Mosul and Kirkuk, where unconfirmed reports also suggest...