Word: iraq
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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This time, if and when Operation Desert Thunder is launched against Iraq, the Pentagon says it doesn't plan to target Saddam. The operation's bombing campaign, scheduled to go on for about a week, would drop most of its bombs and cruise missiles on four sets of targets: first, Iraq's air-defense network and the command centers that wire it together; second, the buildings and bunkers that allied intelligence has linked with the production of biological and chemical weapons; third, support facilities for poison-gas production, including some of the "presidential palaces" and the Republican Guard units that...
Washington's relations with its allies and hoped-for collaborators would be damaged. Turkey, France, China and Japan are already put out about not being consulted fully or, it seems to them, taken seriously when they question the need to use force against Iraq. U.N. ambassador Bill Richardson was scheduled to be in Tokyo this week explaining the U.S. position, but Japan's U.N. ambassador, Hisashi Owada, is still miffed because Richardson neglected to tell him he was planning the trip. Apparently, Richardson's diplomacy doesn't include talking to Iraq's representatives in the U.S. Baghdad's U.N. ambassador...
...dozens of titanium-clad cruise missiles as they arrive in Baghdad from U.S. warships and submarines in the Persian Gulf and perhaps from giant B-52 bombers lumbering in from their Indian Ocean base on Diego Garcia. The cruise missiles will come crashing through the windows and walls of Iraq's main military command-and-communications centers. Over the crump and flame of those explosions will sound the roar of low-flying F-117 stealth attack planes as they swoop undetected over air-defense centers--the computer-filled offices that direct missile fire against airborne attackers--drilling their targets with...
...will not be safe for unstealthy planes until Iraq's antiaircraft-missile batteries are destroyed. That assignment is in the hands of electronic-warfare planes like the Air Force's EF-111 Ravens and F-16CJs and the Navy's EA-6B Prowlers, which will fly in behind the F-117s. Their jammers blank out ground-based radar and computer screens, and some of them let fly with HARM missiles, which home in on and destroy radar installations, leaving antiaircraft missiles at the site blind and useless...
Then there are the worrying and very tangible costs the U.S. will have to pay if it bombs Iraq. Because many of the key targets in urban areas and elsewhere will be packed with "human shields," the attacks will kill civilians, including women and children. Saddam will lose no time laying out their bodies for the world's press to photograph. The Arab world is already disapproving, and could explode into anti-American demonstrations once the bloody corpses appear on television...