Word: frontal
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Once the bombing had softened up the Iraqi positions, U.S. ground forces could go into action. Part of the force might swing to the west to cut off Iraqi forces in southern Iraq while other units mounted a frontal attack to smash through enemy defenses in Kuwait. Though military tradition holds that an attacking force must have a 3-to-1 superiority in numbers to be confident of victory, U.S. troops have good reasons for discounting those odds in a battle against Iraq. Among them...
Fight a defensive war. The aim would be to survive the American aerial blitz that would open the war and then force or lure the U.S. and its allies into a series of grinding, fearsomely bloody frontal assaults on heavily dug-in Iraqi positions -- a recrudescence, 75-odd years later, of World War I-style trench warfare. That would be accompanied by some of the biggest tank battles ever fought, which would also be destructive and bloody. The allies might suffer huge losses so quickly that they would speedily sue for peace or perhaps accede to a panicky U.N. call...
...enemy headquarters and troops in the field, infrared devices supposed to turn night into day for soldiers drawing a bead on hostile troops and armor. The Iraqi forces in Kuwait would rely on an extensive network of minefields, earth berms, razor wire and trenches designed to make an enemy frontal assault as fruitlessly bloody as the British Somme offensive...
...sense, this exhibition is an impossible task: you cannot boil down so vast a visual culture and ship it to a museum, especially when so much of the essential evidence consists of immovable buildings and their ornament. One silver altar frontal or a gilded retablo, no matter how impressive in itself, cannot possibly duplicate the devotional frenzy of incrustation that gives Mexican Baroque its special character, any more than a few Chacmool figures and feathered serpents can convey the impact of the step pyramids, ramps and avenues of Chichen Itza or El Tajin...
Presiding alone amid dozens of empty chairs on the two-tier tribunal, Gorbachev managed to sidestep that first frontal attack. But there was plenty more Politburo bashing to come in the opening week of the ten-day conclave. Progressives and conservatives argued bitterly over who was responsible for the party's fading power. Nine members of the twelve-member council were forced to give accounts of themselves, and the assembly was not about to let them get away with long-winded, cliche-laden speeches. Where past Kremlin meetings greeted boiler-plate presentations with perfunctory outbursts of applause, this one constantly...