Word: iraqi
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...Schwarzkopf expected a long war, what else could the American people expect? The airwaves were surfeited with predictions of more than 10,000 American dead during at least six weeks of fighting. Colorful maps on the networks and in most publications located the positions of well-entrenched Iraqi troops who had constructed near-impenetrable embankmentsto keep coalition forces from ousting them...
Saddam's iron-fisted control over the Iraqi people meant that after a war began, he could wait--sit in his impregnable underground German-engineered fortress and wait while the Americans trotted out images of the Vietnam quagmire and became increasingly disillusioned as the bodybags came home. Many said he could do just what Ho Chi Minh had done--wait for a win by default as the American people grew disgusted with the Gulf War. A ground war simply could not be the right answer...
...horror of many Americans, President Bush moved hastily to end economic sanctions and began the air war just after the U.N. deadline. While this may seem like an intelligent move in retrospect, at the time sanctions were still a viable option. No military supplies had entered Iraq in months; Iraqi oil remained almost completely unsold. Even a limited air war would endanger the lives of many Iraqi civilians who could at least obtain food and medicine under the sanctions...
...addition, American military experts were predicting at least some resistance from the Iraqi air force--not the quick retreat to Iran that actually occurred. Adm. William J. Crowe Jr. and Gen. David C. Jones, both former chairs of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, called on Bush to allow more time for sanctions to be effective, as did former national security adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski. Perhaps sanctions would have failed in the long run, and we now know that the air war proved successful. But before January 16, continuing to enforce sanctions was the most logical and life-saving course of action...
...NONE of this happened. No long quagmire, no massive numbers of American deaths, no diplomatic crisis, no Israeli reprisals for the Iraqi Scud attacks. Almost none of the horrible events predicted by the American intelligentsia and the U.S. government came true. So should we support...