Word: lethality
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Driving Saddam's hardware is the most lethal software. He is a master of 20th century totalitarianism. In Republic of Fear, reissued last year by Pantheon, Samir al-Khalil argues that Saddam's political forebears include not just Adolf Hitler -- the precedent George Bush likes to stress -- but Joseph Stalin as well. A corollary to the cult of personality is the principle that everyone but the leader is expendable. In addition to ensuring obedience, terror reminds the followers that they are cannon fodder in the struggle ("the mother of battles," as Saddam would have it) against all who oppose Numero...
...Miller's gunship, a ponderous Huey "hog," was taking on a fresh load of rockets and grenades, a Soviet-made 122-mm shell exploded several yards away in a lethal burst of metal. Fragments shredded his pants, embedding themselves in his legs. One shard burned its way into his throat. After the field surgeon in Pleiku extracted a chunk close to his jugular vein, an opening the size of a quarter remained in his neck. "I was fascinated by the hole," he says, rubbing the scar. "When I looked in the mirror, I could see my Adam's apple...
...coalition partners are also worried that a lethal knockout punch to Saddam would turn him into an even greater hero on the Arab street than he already is. And though the allies view their campaign in the gulf as just, there are moral limits to the conduct of war, even when confronting an opponent who behaves as despicably as Saddam. "Military professionals have a very strong sense of what distinguishes the work they do from butchering," says Michael Walzer, a professor of social science at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, N.J. "It is a moral sense, even though...
...Bakal brothers, Eddie and Jake, the road to the American dream runs dead center through one of the most lethal neighborhoods in Detroit. The brothers, who moved there from Iraq in the mid-1970s, own a convenience store at the intersection of Seven Mile and Van Dyke roads, an easy rifle shot from streets lined with abandoned houses and open-air drug markets. To look at their tidy store, swaddled in bulletproof glass, surrounded by surveillance cameras and equipped with a small arsenal in back, one would think they too were in the middle...
...last summer, at 47, Maria decided to have both breasts removed. Her own graceful curves were replaced with silicone implants that harbored no trace of her family's lethal legacy. A short time later, Maria received a report that vindicated her decision. A postoperative examination of her breast tissue had found precancerous lesions. "I just broke down and cried," she recalls. "I'd done this knowing I might never know if I'd made the right choice...