Word: deserts
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...middle-class villas, grime and time eating away the old tenements of the poor. Everyone in the streets looks shabby and tired. You see few smiling faces, and only the black-market profiteers and smugglers are well dressed. Sandy dust coats everything in a city slipping back into the desert...
...real signs of war fever disturb the bedraggled city. People say the army has been moving its tanks and guns into the desert, to remote desert bivouacs where they hope U.S. missiles cannot find them. Command centers near the highway to Jordan, the only land link out of this isolated country, have been abandoned as generals disperse to makeshift headquarters. Antiaircraft guns ring the airport where U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan landed for the talks that Iraqis dare to hope will forestall the bombs. "We want him to bring peace," says a shopkeeper watching the babies' coffins...
Saddam Hussein is simple. Villains are often simple. Alone in the desert, thumbing his nose at the world. Armed, dangerous, easy to hate. But so hard to catch. Why? In the westerns, the hero rode alone. The villains always had a gang. Think Gary Cooper. High Noon (1952). The hero always won. In international politics, though, that elegance disappears. Too many cooks? Try too many allies. The common enemy suddenly gets complicated. The Third Man (1949) knows this. A film noir with real profundity, the movie is home to one of moviedom's great villains: Harry Lime. Yet Orson Welles...
...Operation Desert Thunder be stopped? Perhaps. Saddam might play his cheat-and-retreat game again, promising to open all sites in Iraq to unconditional inspection, and then throw up new roadblocks in a month or two. Or he can refuse to yield and take his punishment, emerging after a week to wave his taunting wave and fire his pistol into the air. He will probably then kick all the inspectors out and demand an end to sanctions on the cynical grounds that Iraqis have suffered enough...
...back to the business of producing the weapons and missiles he obviously yearns for. Then what? If he does that, Cohen and Albright say, the U.S. would respond with still another air attack. It is hard to tell whether they are serious or bluffing. But if Operation Desert Thunder is so hard to sell and so likely to be costly, its sequel may be doubly...