Word: saddamism
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...before the assault. Bessmertnykh immediately told President Mikhail Gorbachev, who telephoned Bush to propose a final Soviet warning to its former ally to get out of Kuwait or else. Bush had no objection, so Gorbachev composed a letter that the Soviet ambassador to Baghdad was instructed to deliver to Saddam immediately. Too late. The ambassador could not find the Iraqi President and had to hand the letter to Foreign Minister Aziz -- in a bunker, after the attack had begun...
...goal, he said, "is not the conquest of Iraq; it is the liberation of Kuwait." But in the process, he indicated, the anti-Iraq coalition would destroy the offensive military machine that made Iraq a menace to its neighbors. Said Bush: "We are determined to knock out Saddam Hussein's nuclear-bomb potential. We will also destroy his chemical-weapons facilities...
...Scud missile was stored, and a third plopping down the rooftop air shaft of a tall building in Baghdad -- apparently the headquarters of the Iraqi air force -- and then blowing off the top floors. Bombs and missiles also hit other targets around and even in the heart of Baghdad -- Saddam's presidential palace, for one -- while apparently doing little damage to civilian lives or < property. Though Baghdad's ambassador to Japan said many Iraqi civilians had been killed, Western correspondents wandering around the city after the raids could find no sign that the report was true...
...theory is that Saddam Hussein genuinely believed the U.S. was bluffing. Another is that the Iraqi leader had little idea of the speed, stealth and power of a modern aerial and missile attack. Said a Bush adviser: "We weren't entirely sure how well some of this high-tech stuff would work in combat, so it's no wonder that Saddam might be surprised." Or perhaps Iraq simply lacked the technical ability to fend off such an offensive...
Still another theory was that Saddam might be deliberately saving some of his aircraft and missiles to strike back later. If so, it was a risky strategy. For example, the Iraqi dictator might have been able to save many of his planes by hiding them in hardened underground bunkers; the U.S. has been bombing those bunkers, but is uncertain how many of the planes inside them it has been able to destroy. According to a White House official, it hardly matters, "because now they can't take off. We've cratered almost all the runways." Later assessments, though, were that...