Word: saddamism
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Bereft of satellites or even aerial reconnaissance, Saddam's commanders could not see what was going on behind allied lines. Thus Schwarzkopf was able to hoodwink Baghdad into concentrating its forces in the wrong places until the very end. Six of Iraq's 42 divisions were massed along the Kuwaiti coast, guarding against a seaborne invasion. U.S. Marines repeatedly practiced amphibious landings, as conspicuously as possible, and as zero hour approached, an armada of 31 ships swung into position to put them ashore near Kuwait City. The battleships Missouri and Wisconsin took turns, an hour at a time, firing their...
...begin the ground assault. But some subordinates thought they needed two more days to get ready. So he and George Bush fixed 8 p.m. Saturday, Feb. 23 -- noon in Washington -- as zero hour, and Bush made that the expiration time of a final ultimatum to Saddam. As the deadline approached, tanks equipped with bulldozer blades cut wide openings through the sand berms Saddam's soldiers had erected as a defensive wall along the border, and tanks and troops began pushing through on probing attacks; some were across hours before the deadline...
...line. Though Hollywood has long pictured the desert as a place of eternal burning sunshine and total aridity, the attack began in a lashing rain that turned the sand into muddy goo. The first troops through were wearing bulky chemical-protective garb, in keeping with the allied conviction that Saddam would use poison gas right from the beginning. In fact, the Iraqis never fired their chemical weapons...
...Euphrates as early as Monday; by Wednesday morning they were established in enough force to prevent further crossings. British units cut the main Kuwait City-Basra highway early in the day; ! American Marines had reached it farther to the south the previous afternoon. The gate had slammed shut on Saddam's forces in Kuwait. Their escape routes were broken. Encirclement was complete...
...tanks it had deployed in the Kuwait theater at the start of the war -- then added, "As a matter of fact, you can add 700 to that as a result of the battle that's going on right now with the Republican Guard." Saddam's forces lost similarly high proportions of their other armored vehicles, artillery and trucks. The result, said Schwarzkopf, was that Iraq was left with only an infantry army, no longer capable of offensive operations and therefore not a threat to other countries in the region. That fulfilled one of the two principal allied war aims...