Word: desertic
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...Defense--gathered in the Oval Office on Wednesday afternoon, Feb. 27, 1991, they agreed that their military and political objectives in the Persian Gulf had been met. Saddam's forces, which had invaded Kuwait seven months before, had been routed. General Norman Schwarzkopf, commander in chief of Operation Desert Storm, concurred in the judgment. Bush had a clear goal for the war: it was not to topple Saddam, much less to march on Baghdad, but to drive the Iraqi army out of Kuwait. The President had assembled a grand coalition, including armies from many Arab states, behind that...
...enough to unnerve many of the U.S. forces, which were gearing up to begin their invasion on Friday. With each missile alert, frontline soldiers were forced to retreat to their bunkers and don full-protection biochem suits, only to hear minutes later that the bombs had landed in the desert or the gulf. Even commanders in Kuwait held videoconferences with Franks while wearing their gas masks. The haphazard nature of Iraq's response convinced Pentagon officials that the U.S. strike had succeeded in creating a power vacuum inside the Iraqi military command, cutting links between Baghdad and its forces...
...didn't seem to matter. Whatever enemy resistance the allies expected to face on their first push into Iraq was gone by the time they got there. Columns of U.S. and British tanks, trucks, humvees and armored personnel carriers fanned out across the southern Iraqi desert on the road to Baghdad. In the war's first days, Bedouin campsites were a more common sight than Iraqi garrisons. Some U.S. troops could barely hide their disappointment at not coming under enemy fire. "What the hell did we come here to do?" asked First Sergeant William Mitchell, 34, a member of Charlie...
Urban combat, chemical weapons, civilian casualties, guerrilla warfare, humanitarian crises in the south, instability in the north--whatever the unknowns that lurked ahead, the war machine was undeterred, as evidenced by the various units rolling across the desert, preparing to deliver the ultimate blow to the Iraqi regime. While each day that the war drags on gives the Iraqis a chance to regroup, it also grants allied forces the opportunity to reload. As the 3rd Infantry Division made its way past Nasiriyah, a long column of the 101st Airborne Division barreled out of Kuwait into the desert on a parallel...
...they would go too. None of them would risk their life to tell Saddam the truth. He probably didn't care. As he wrote in one of his autobiographies, "I've always preferred to make my decisions without the involvement of others. My decisions are harsh, just like my desert...