Word: deserts
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...will find signs that you're returning to a different country than the one you left in August: proud, resolute, united and overwhelmed with national purpose. You will be lavished with honors, medals and ribbons, streets named after you, Desert Storm ice cream flavors. You who wrote to us of your fears of coming home should not worry. No one will spit on you. You will not be called baby killers, and we promise that you will not grow old holding a sign in a subway station: I'M A VETERAN. CAN YOU SPARE SOME CHANGE...
...troops in the Gulf, said shortly after the war that he had expected a "60-day siege" of Iraq and Kuwait to push Saddam Hussein's forces out of the emirate. The massive buildup in the Gulf had deposited thousands of tons of supplies and ammunition on the Saudi desert for the long haul...
...cold, foul day, people greet each other with small bouquets of words: "Morning of blessings! Morning of light!" They have conjured a moment, and smiled, and passed, and then, poof! they are back on a miserable street among the pariah dogs. If people are poor and live in the desert, language may be their richest possession: Why not? It opens miraculously onto other worlds. The Koran, with its bursts of sonority and light, describes a paradise that has everything the desert does not: the sweetest water, cool shade, silken couches, wines that one can endlessly drink without getting drunk...
...makan is intoxication enough. It was out of the desert that humans conjured monotheism -- absolute God to suffuse utter emptiness. When kan ya makan enters politics, its genius makes language a reality superior to the deed -- even renders the facts of the objective world unnecessary and graceless. The vivid hallucination becomes the act: the prophecy is more satisfying than its literal fulfillment. If the demagogue-bard says the infidel will swim in his own blood, then words have pre-empted the work of armies. Ambiguity has an ancient history in the West, but the Middle East has its special genius...
...Desert Storm was about more than oil and jobs...