Word: iraqi
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1990-1999
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...guns went silent across the gulf, there were victory celebrations on the home front, but for TIME correspondents covering the war, few moments of exhilaration. The road to Kuwait City was a desolate highway lined by unlit Iraqi fire trenches, burning oil wells and refineries, power lines to nowhere. When it rained on Thursday, correspondent William Dowell looked down at his soaked shirt and saw that it was black with soot, sifted through skies darkened by smoke from burning oil fields...
...grisliest sights," said Dowell, "was the morgue at Al-Sabah Hospital. All of the bodies had been mutilated." Reporter Lara Marlowe found a resistance headquarters in the suburb of Qarain, where she was shown 16 Iraqi prisoners. "No one realized what evil the Iraqis had done until we got here," she said. "It was hard to understand how these frightened, wounded people could be part of a war machine that raped and tortured...
Even at the edge of the abyss, U.S. policy toward Iraq ran headlong into contradiction with itself. On July 25, 1990, as Iraqi tanks and troops were massing along the border of Kuwait, U.S. Ambassador April Glaspie told President Saddam Hussein in Baghdad that the U.S. had little to say about Arab border disputes and was eager to improve relations with Iraq. That same day in Washington, anxious State Department officials urged the Pentagon to dispatch the aircraft carrier U.S.S. Independence and its battle group, then in the Indian Ocean, to the mouth of the Persian Gulf -- as a signal...
Days passed. The Joint Chiefs of Staff resisted sending the Independence, arguing that such a force, obviously no more than a token, would be no match for Saddam's giant war machine. Just before the invasion, with the Iraqi army now poised for assault, the White House overruled the Pentagon's concerns and ordered the warships toward the gulf. The decision probably came too late to impress Saddam...
...problem was the nature of Iraq's political structure. Saddam ran a ruthless, highly centralized regime. Says Richard Murphy, Assistant Secretary of State for Near Eastern and South Asian Affairs in the Reagan Administration: "The intelligence was limited, always has been, and still is today. The access to Iraqi officialdom and private citizens was extraordinarily limited." The U.S. had few intelligence assets within Iraq; as one American official says, analysts were reduced to "dealing with a welter of contradictory, fragmentary and incomplete information, and then trying to make sense out of that mess...