Word: kuwait
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 2000-2009
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
KERRY: It's very simple. I was for kicking Saddam Hussein out of Kuwait. I was for using force if we needed to. I simply felt, based on Colin Powell's own statements and others', that we needed a little more time to get the support of the nation in the event that things didn't go well. When you go to war, you want the support of your nation. But there was never a doubt about kicking him out--never a doubt about using force, never a doubt about what was at stake. In the case of this instance...
When they were done, Rumsfeld and Franks invaded a nation 25 times the size of nearby Kuwait, with roughly half the troops used in 1991--a revolution in the way the U.S. fights wars. Baghdad fell in 21 days, and the U.S. suffered 103 combat fatalities. The plan, according to retired Marine Lieut. Colonel Jay Farrar, "proved to the Army that it can go in lighter and sustain itself longer than it ever imagined...
Thus were born the new American services, which since 1990 have fought five wars--in Kuwait, Bosnia, Kosovo, Afghanistan and Iraq--with outstanding success. Even a superpower, however, is only as good as the forces through which it exercises that power. But Pax Americana, like Pax Britannica, is guaranteed by a body of servicemen and -women who have no equal elsewhere on the globe...
...diplomacy normally involves the disguising of discord, Bush's policy meant inflaming it: NATO and the U.N. were divided; so was our own government, as State, the Pentagon and the CIA grappled in a three-way tug-of-war. One Marine, training in Kuwait's northern desert and waiting for war to begin, wondered whether protesters would spit on him when he came home. But for all the dissension, no one was blaming the soldiers: antiwar demonstrators argued they were fighting to defend our troops against an ill-conceived mission based on distorted intelligence. Even Howard Dean, whose antiwar campaign...
...Tomb Raiders are now stretched thin. With Beverly likely to remain outside of Iraq for the rest of the deployment and Whiteside preparing for reassignment to another unit, only six soldiers who were part of the platoon when it was constituted in Kuwait will still be in country in 2004. For missions outside the wire, the Tomb Raiders borrow soldiers from other platoons, but they have to carry out their routine duties--monitoring the radio, maintaining vehicles, staffing the battalion's Internet cafe, manning guard positions on the roof--with fewer soldiers, straining their combat effectiveness. "Maybe...