Word: iraq
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Just how high a price is a different matter. The Pentagon acknowledged that the cruise missiles homed in on only 40% of Iraq's fixed air defenses. But that equipment wasn't of much use to the grounded Iraqi air force anyway. The point of the expanded no-fly area is to make it even harder for Saddam to venture south against the crucial oil lands of Kuwait and Saudi Arabia. "Iraq," gloats a senior Air Force officer, "is the incredible shrinking country" now that allied planes rule the skies over the critical mass of its terrain. And, says Geoffrey...
Well, maybe. Clinton defined his success by claiming that Iraq's leader was now "strategically worse off." Most analysts say the practical impact on Saddam is minimal and any longer-term effect hard to gauge. More important is how Clinton scored in the ongoing U.S. vs. Iraq psychodrama. At home the President did just fine. He shut off carping about "fecklessness" from the Dole camp and forced his rival to declare support for the military operation. A TIME/CNN poll gave Clinton a 69% approval rating for his missile reprisal...
...Clinton's Gulf diplomacy is in trouble. By conducting the raid inside Iraq's sovereign territory, Saddam engineered discomfiting divisions in the allied coalition, where cohesion has already been dissolving as many member nations lose their anti-Saddam resolve. Secretary of State Warren Christopher could not persuade France to join in patrolling the expanded no-fly zone, and the U.N. Security Council, blocked by Russia, could not agree on a resolution condemning the Iraqi attack...
...remove Saddam dismissed the U.S. strikes as mere pinpricks. Most countries considered them an unwarranted example of U.S. globo-copping, self-serving unilateral military action dictated by election-year politics. The suffering of ordinary Iraqis after five years of embargo has recast the U.S. as the bully and Iraq as the victim...
...crisis has turned the spotlight unflatteringly on Clinton's whole policy of dual containment, intended to isolate both Iraq and the other rogue state of Iran. It requires a costly and highly visible concentration of U.S. military might ($40 billion a year by one estimate) that is no longer so welcome in conservative and often xenophobic Gulf states. Meanwhile, Saddam remains uncowed and free to mount new disruptions, to defy the U.S. wherever he can. While Washington has curbed his appetite for external adventures, it has failed to control his misbehavior at home. He has buffed up his tough...