Word: saddamism
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Appearing before the cameras at 10 o'clock, the President looked somber, and his sentences were plain, devoid of any rhetorical flourish. Harking back to a Friday-morning appearance in the bright sunshine of the Rose Garden, he remarked that he had given Saddam Hussein "one last chance . . . to do what he should have done more than six months ago: withdraw from Kuwait without condition or further delay." Saddam, he said, had responded only with "a redoubling" of efforts "to destroy completely Kuwait and its people" -- a reference to the "scorched earth" torching of oil wells and systematic executions...
Bush gave Saddam the Saturday deadline after a frustrating week of Soviet efforts to broker a deal that would be acceptable to both Iraq and the allies. Moscow had secured Baghdad's commitment to a supposedly "unconditional" pullout from Kuwait, but the agreement was accompanied by a string of conditions. Washington and its major partners advanced a number of reasons for rejecting the Soviet-mediated offer, ranging from simple distrust of Saddam to news of the scorched-earth policy in Kuwait. But the predominant reason was a feeling that delay was beginning to work against the allies. They were being...
...Moscow apparently trying to save Saddam from exactly that fate? Though the U.S.S.R. never sent any troops to the Persian Gulf or made any financial contribution to the anti-Saddam alliance, its role in helping to buttress that alliance was crucial. Without Soviet assent, the U.N. Security Council could never have demanded that Iraq pull out of Kuwait, or organized the worldwide embargo against Iraq, or approved the use of force against Baghdad. Continued U.S.-Soviet cooperation is a cornerstone on which Bush hopes to build a new world order; conversely, nothing could destroy the alliance's hopes so totally...
...bitterly critical of his alleged kowtowing to Washington. At a time of seething separatism that threatens the very existence of the Soviet Union, Gorbachev also must avoid antagonizing the tens of millions of Muslims in the U.S.S.R.'s Central Asian and Transcaucasian republics, and they tend to sympathize with Saddam. Still more to the point, in strict power terms, a Middle East outcome that froze Soviet influence out of the region and left a triumphant U.S. as the dominant power in that strategic crossroads so close to the U.S.S.R.'s southern borders would make any Kremlin regime nervous...
Privately, the coalition partners decided to go further and spell out what they would accept. Their proposals were sent by Bush to Gorbachev Tuesday night, presumably to be relayed to Aziz when he returned to Moscow after communicating the Soviet proposal to Saddam...