Word: preware
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...verge of collapse." For the past two weeks, Schwarzkopf's aides maintain, allied smart bombs have been knocking out Iraq's main battle tanks at the rate of 100 a day. At week's end they announced Iraq had lost, at a minimum, 1,685 tanks (out of a prewar total of 4,280), 925 armored personnel carriers (out of 2,800), 1,450 artillery pieces (out of 3,110) and 375 fixed-wing aircraft (out of 800) -- including 138 stashed away in Iran...
What is left of Kuwait? And what will it take to rebuild the country after the Iraqis are forced out of Kuwait? Precise answers will not become clear until allied troops actually march into Kuwait City, the capital, economic center and home to 80% of Kuwait's prewar population of 2 million. Before last week, sketchy reports seeping out of the occupied emirate portrayed a country that had sustained much damage and disruption but was far from devastated. That picture, however, may have been tragically altered by the billowing clouds of smoke emanating from Kuwaiti oil wells late last week...
...difficult and time-consuming task, Kuwait's 94.5 billion-bbl. oil reserves will hardly be dented. Depending on how much damage has been done to other facilities, production could resume within six months after the end of hostilities, Kuwaiti officials say -- though it may be years before output reaches prewar levels. "They will not lose enough to threaten their reserves or their economy or the world oil market in the long term," said an American oil expert...
Repopulation of the country will probably take weeks or months as Kuwait City's infrastructure, utilities and other services are restored. Even then the population will most probably have a quite different composition from that of prewar Kuwait. Nearly 60% of the residents before the Iraqi invasion were foreign workers and their families. Whoever rules the restored nation may sharply reduce that proportion...
Except for revolution, nothing changes a country more than war. Indeed, the very definition of a people often revolves around a reference to war. We speak of the antebellum South, prewar Germany, post-Vietnam America. If the war in the gulf ends the way it began -- with a dazzling display of American technological superiority, individual grit and, most unexpectedly for Saddam, national resolve -- we will no longer speak of post-Vietnam America. A new, post-gulf America will emerge, its self-image, sense of history, even its political discourse transformed...