Word: iraq
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...because the Iraqi President, who builds palaces while his people starve, seems willing to let his country hunker down and absorb almost limitless punishment. Such an attack would involve bomber squadrons as well as missiles, endangering American lives. It would also convulse the Arab world, which fears a destabilized Iraq--"Beirut with ballistic missiles," as a Gulf Defense Minister describes it--as much as it fears Saddam. The region is already roiled by the U.S. failure to push Israel into meaningful peace negotiations with the Palestinians. Those looking for a symbol of the fractious, anti-American climate that has emboldened...
...behind him should he unleash the military, many of the allies he wants beside him aren't likely to, because he neglected the Gulf War coalition he inherited from George Bush. "We knew the coalition was slipping away, but we kept saying, 'We can manage it,'" says a leading Iraq expert inside the government. "There was complacency. And there's not much excuse for not having a strategy to deal with what's happened because we've been talking about it for years...
Though caught off guard by the crisis, Clinton has been resolute in dealing with it. He kept his public comments pointed but brief while lining up unanimous support for the Security Council resolution condemning Iraq, then turned to the harder task of enlisting allied support for military action. The President has never been one to rush into major military engagements. He prefers to wait until opportunities present themselves. In Bosnia he agonized and delayed for years until the warring sides were exhausted, then bombed the Serbs to the peace table. But he knows there's no time for that...
Washington believes it has all the authority it needs to attack Iraq under existing U.N. resolutions. Security Council sources believe it is unlikely that Washington will go back to the Council for authorization since France and Russia would probably exercise their veto power. In the next week Clinton will try to get those allies on board in some fashion by asking them to try to change Saddam's mind. Clinton planned to speak on the phone over the weekend with both Boris Yeltsin and Jacques Chirac; Russian Foreign Minister Yevgeni Primakov, who has been in frequent contact with Iraqi leaders...
...took days to reach the aircraft carrier, the CIA was rushing satellite-reconnaissance photos to the Nimitz's dimly lit combat center in just minutes. Out on the flight deck, pilots in F-14s and F-18s who were executing as many as six sorties a day over southern Iraq reported that Saddam was preparing for an American attack by dispersing his surface-to-air missile batteries and bunkering his jets. TIME has learned that fighters from the Nimitz planned to accompany the first U-2 reconnaissance flight on Sunday or Monday, flying at a much lower altitude than...