Word: saddamism
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Says a senior Pentagon officer: "Had Iraq occupied Saudi ports and airfields, the ((allied)) buildup as we know it would have been impossible." If Saddam had seized control of so much of the region's oil, fears of devastating price rises or of losing supplies altogether might have deterred the allies from even considering the use of force against Iraq...
Having stopped at the Saudi border, however, Saddam developed a strategic fixation on keeping Kuwait. He declared it the 19th province of Iraq and concentrated more and more of his troops -- 535,000 eventually -- on its soil or just north of the Kuwait-Iraq frontier. Apparently he hoped to refight his past war, the eight-year contest of attrition with Iran, battling from behind elaborate fortifications and minefields, with armored reserves quickly deployable to seal off enemy breakthroughs...
...Saddam was so preoccupied with the defense of Kuwait that he did not extend his defensive line of berms, razor wire and mines more than a few miles west of the Kuwait frontier that faces Saudi Arabia. The struggle for Kuwait, he said in January, would finally depend on "the soldier who comes with rifle and bayonet to fight the soldier in the battle trench." In that, he boasted, "we are people with experience...
...coalition did not give the Iraqis a chance to apply it. Once the air offensive began on Jan. 16, it became obvious that for the first time air power was going to play a decisive role in war. Again Saddam made a misstep: after losing 36 fighters to allied aircraft, fighters he sent aloft, he grounded his 800-plane air force and eventually dispatched 137 of his top-of- the-line combat and transport aircraft to sanctuary in Iran. Allied planes then flew 80,000 sorties virtually unhindered and lost only 36, dramatically fewer than the 200 the coalition command...
Iraq's field army, committed to the static defense of Kuwait, simply had to dig in and take the pounding. That commitment only intensified after Saddam fell for allied bluffs that a seaborne invasion was coming. After six weeks of bombing, frontline units were isolated, mostly unable to communicate with Baghdad or one another, short of food and water. Many divisions had lost half of their equipment and, more important, their will to fight...