Word: saddamism
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...formidable are these Iraqi troops? One Pentagon analyst concedes that until the Iraq-Iran war erupted in 1980, "we knew zero about the Iraqis." In that conflict Saddam's troops often bogged down in offensive operations but excelled in defense, particularly when resisting Iranian thrusts into their homeland. Though individual units sometimes broke under fire, the main ground forces proved to be courageous, tenacious -- and maliciously inventive. One bizarre operation rigged lowland marshes with electrodes to kill Iranians as they waded through the water toward Iraqi lines...
...Baath Party had purged almost all non-Baathist officers from the army during the 1970s. As a result, the officer corps stopped seeing itself as the defender of a national entity known as Iraq and began to see its mission as the preservation of the party and its leader, Saddam Hussein. By 1980, a fifth of Iraq's work force was in the army, police or militia. The effect of Saddam's policies was to turn the country into an ideologically motivated military machine. Rumors of coups and plots within the military had no significant result on the conduct...
...Saddam's strategy is clear -- making a virtue of necessity. He cannot reach out and strike the allied forces because his air force is in hiding or in exile, his insignificant navy is bottled up, and his Scud missiles are too inaccurate to pose much threat to military targets. He can only hope that the allied troops will come to him in a frontal assault on his fixed positions...
Chemical weapons are horrifying and unreliable, and some military specialists have questioned whether Saddam would resort to them. Poisons might not be highly effective because modern armored vehicles have filters to keep them out and infantrymen wear protective gear. But Saddam is determined to kill as many allied troops as possible, and his chemical shells caused an estimated 25,000 Iranian deaths...
...Saddam's keen desire to lure allied forces into ground combat, the sooner the better, is obvious to General Norman Schwarzkopf and his colleagues. As the allied commander pointed out last week, his air campaign is now blasting the supply lines to Kuwait, especially bridges over the Tigris and Euphrates rivers...