Word: kuwait
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 2000-2009
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...right to do so. Born in Beirut in 1983 to a Lebanese mother and American father, he was evacuated with his family a year later, "because the war got really bad." They joined the Lebanese community in Paris before Mika's father, on a business trip to Kuwait in 1990, became trapped in the U.S. embassy for seven months when the Gulf War broke out. A new job after the war meant a move to London, where Mika was bullied at school. "I was called everything from 'childbearing hips' to 'choirboy fag,'" he says. But that didn't stop...
...died at the hands of his henchmen and security forces. The true measure of his monstrosity, however, was not in any body count but in his subjugation of Iraqi minds. In February 2003, on the eve of the U.S. invasion, I visited a small village on the border with Kuwait. The local elder, known as Abu Mohammed, knew that when the fighting began, his tiny watermelon farm would be trampled by American tanks. I asked him if he was frightened. "Not of the Americans, but of Saddam," he said. "If I don't stand and fight, my entire family will...
...West had its own bloody experience with Sadr's Da'wa. In December 1983, Da'wa attacked the American and French embassies in Kuwait. The Da'wa was the core around which Iran created Lebanon's Hizballah, another violent Shi'a group that went on to kidnap scores of foreigners and hijack half a dozen airplanes during the '80s - long before it also became a political player in Lebanon...
...curb Iran's Islamic Revolution. Many countries - including the U.S. - supported Saddam as a bulwark against Islamic fundamentalism, which they deemed a greater long-term political threat to Western interests than Arab nationalism. But Saddam followed Nasser in blundering his way to defeat, starting with his invasion of Kuwait...
...With one exception, when it has gone into combat, it has sooner or later retreated in defeat and left behind a mess to be cleaned up later. This happened in Vietnam in the '70s, Lebanon in the '80s and Somalia in the '90s. The exception was the liberation of Kuwait, but this achievement was devalued by President Bush Jr., who clearly regarded the situation in the area as unfinished family business that he had to revisit. So it is no surprise that the U.S. is now looking for a strategy in Iraq that will guarantee its exit, but little else...