Word: battlefield
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Until Washington weighed in, the Iraqis had been stoutly maintaining that they had not used poison gas and that the charges had been concocted by the Iranians to excuse their battlefield defeats. The Iraqis continued to deny the charge, though they did not rule out the possible use of chemical warfare in the future. Said Major General Sabah al Fakhri, commander of Iraqi forces east of the Tigris River: "If a superpower threatened the U.S., what would it do? We too have our dignity and honor. We are not going to meet the invader with flowers and perfume...
...danger was that if Iraq suffered a major battlefield defeat it might decide to use the Super Etendard fighter-bombers it bought from France last fall to attack Kharg Island, Iran's principal oil terminal. Iran has repeatedly said it would retaliate by blockading the strait, thereby halting shipment of most of the oil produced by Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates and Iran. Last week Iranian officials warned again that if the U.S. and its supporters try to intervene in the war "their fate would be decisively worse than their fate in Lebanon...
...that South Africa might unleash its vastly superior muscle against Mozambique. In the past year South Africa has conducted major military operations against guerrilla strongholds of the South West African People's Organization (SWAPO) in Angola and has staged periodic raids on A.N.C. bases in Mozambique. Despite its battlefield successes, however, South Africa has been growing weary of the regional struggle, which is expected to consume some 10% of this year's national budget and has brought a mounting toll of casualties...
Alits end, the article notes that "If Israel took the trouble to try to understand its Moslem neighbors rather than blindly hate them, it could learn an important lesson." On many levels, Israel knows its Moslem neighbors only too well it has met them on the battlefield in four bloody wars, all, with the possible exception of the 1956 Suez conflict, unhated by the Arabs. In addition, over 60 per cent of Israel's Jewish citizens, many of them fluent in Arabic, immigrated, often at gunpoint, or are the descendants of immigrants from Arab lands where they were subjected...
...study does suggest an alternate strategy for deterring a Soviet invasion of Europe. While the threshold beyond which nuclear detonations will create a drastic "nuclear winter" is quite low it does not preclude the use of small battlefield nuclear weapons. The U.S. could use such small yield weapons to offset any real or perceived conventional asymmetry Presumably neither side would risk approaching the threshold by escalating the conflict to include medium range or strategic forces...