Word: saddamism
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Bush suggested another way to end the war. If the Iraqi army and people were "to take matters into their own hands to force Saddam Hussein, the dictator, to step aside," he said, Iraq could quickly "rejoin the family of peace-loving nations." That finally put on the record something that had long been obvious: Washington would really like to get rid of Saddam and his regime altogether. It would settle for a complete pullout from Kuwait because it has no choice: the U.N. resolutions under which the allies are fighting specify that and nothing more as the aim. Achieving...
...other hand, Saddam's hopes of winning the war politically -- even his megalomania never foresaw anything better militarily than a bloody stalemate -- have steadily eroded. His Scud attacks have failed to provoke Israel into retaliation and are a declining menace. Two missiles fired last week at Saudi Arabia broke apart in the sky; two more that landed in southern Israel Saturday caused no reported injuries. His Persian Gulf oil spills have incited more world condemnation than fear, and his threats of triggering worldwide terrorism remain unrealized so far. Well before last week's withdrawal statement, the tone of Baghdad...
That line had some effect. For Saddam, the U.S. hit on the air-raid shelter that, Baghdad said, killed several hundred civilians was manna from propaganda heaven. For millions of people around the world, pictures of the broken bodies dug out of the rubble drove home the horror of a war that until then had seemed, at least on the TV screens, to be rather tame. One of the minor mysteries of the statement about potential withdrawal, in fact, was why Iraq diverted attention away from the civilian deaths before the reaction to them had quite built to a climax...
That reaction would not have saved Saddam in any case, though. Strong as the Arab anger was, it was not quite sufficient to shake the governments (Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Syria) that have made major troop commitments to the coalition. The U.S. and its European allies suffered little if any public backlash against the war. In retrospect, generals played down too much the inevitability of civilian deaths in any bombing campaign. But Westerners, while shocked, seemed to accept the explanations that the U.S. was not directly targeting civilians; that Saddam in contrast was deliberately putting them in harm...
...leaves Iraq with one big hope for a face-saving way out of the war: Soviet diplomacy. Moscow has not only gone along with the U.S. demand that Iraq get out of Kuwait completely and unconditionally but also helped draft the U.N. resolution authorizing the use of force if Saddam did not comply by Jan. 15. That, however, was when glasnost and democratization were in full flower, and Eduard Shevardnadze, a professed friend of the U.S., was Foreign Minister...