Word: iraqis
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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...
...Americans this is the war that really counts, and Clinton was expected to react with firm skill. Despite his preoccupation with politics, the President ordered his foreign policy aides to get cracking on diplomacy to cool off the Kurds. As Iraqi forces moved north, Clinton fired off a strong warning to Saddam that military intervention in Kurd affairs was "not an action he could take without paying a price." To no avail. On the eve of the Iraqi attack, the Administration was issuing public denunciations of Saddam, and by the time his troops reached Erbil the next day the President...
Some counterstrike was practically a political reflex: Clinton would have to do something militarily or suffer damaging charges that he was too weak to stand up to the Iraqi tyrant. In this, the electoral imperative meshed perfectly with the opinions of his policy advisers. Whatever the legal niceties, it was clear to everyone in Washington that Saddam had violated Iraq's postwar rules of the road and had to be slapped down...
...specific actions Clinton selected required more subtle calibration. He rejected more robust but riskier attacks on Baghdad installations or the invading Iraqi forces. The U.S. would strike, as Perry explained, on ground of its own choosing in the south. Washington would be able to expand its longer-term strategic advantage by taking control of a larger share of Iraq's airspace, a move that would also humiliate Saddam in front of his own military. Thus, the decisions to fire two volleys of high-tech, low-casualty cruise missiles against 15 air-defense sites south of Baghdad...
...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...