Word: iraqi
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1980-1989
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Deterring those nightmares has dominated U.S. diplomacy and military decisions. The Carter Administration persuaded Saudi Arabia and other gulf states to stop letting Iraqi warplanes use Saudi airfields, since such complicity might provoke Iranian reprisals. But the Saudis feared they might be attacked by Iran anyway. At their request, the U.S. dispatched four highly sophisticated airborne warning planes, two tankers for mid-air refueling, a ground radar network and 436 U.S. military personnel to fly and operate all that equipment...
There is piquant historical irony in the burgeoning partnership between Iraqi Strongman Saddam Hussein and Jordan's King Hussein. The King's cousin, King Faisal II of Iraq, was slaughtered by the Iraqi military in 1958. Hafez Assad's Syria has negotiated a phony "merger" with Muammar Gaddafi's Libya, even though Gaddafi until recently was suspected of financing the Muslim Brotherhood in Syria, an underground organization dedicated to the assassination of Assad's fellow Alawites, members of a minority Muslim sect that controls the Damascus regime, and in 1976 Gaddafi sent his guerrillas into Lebanon to fight alongside Palestinians...
...antimonarchist Islamic revolution, so they side with Saddam Hussein. Saddam Hussein wants to succeed the Shah as the principal power in the gulf, so he seeks to destroy what is left of the Shah's military machine and ingratiate himself with the conservative gulf states, who then might accept Iraqi hegemony. Syria's Assad feels threatened by Iraq so he allies himself with Iraq's enemy, Iran. Assad strings Gaddafi along on the mostly rhetorical "merger" because Libya has a huge supply of Soviet arms that Syria may need to supplement its own in case of war with Iraq?...
Minister Menachem Begin told the London Sunday Telegraph that Jordanian-Iraqi military cooperation "is very serious to us." Such warnings have heightened worries in the West that Israel could feel compelled to launch a pre-emptive strike against Iraq if Iraq emerges from this war too cocky and powerful...
Saddam Hussein, however, is in no position to dominate the gulf until he wins the war. The Iraqis expected a quick victory when they launched their surprise attack on Iran nearly a month ago. Saddam Hussein had hoped that the Khomeini regime would crumble under the first attacks. Now he needs to turn the stalemate into a clear-cut victory, or at least to extricate himself with some face-saving diplomatic fallback. Otherwise, Iraq's strongman runs the risk of falling victim to the same kind of coup that he engineered against a number of his former comrades and superiors...