Word: saudi
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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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...
...them. Dwight D. Eisenhower, the Supreme Allied Commander in Europe during World War II, said that "morale is the greatest single factor in successful war." In the course of unrelenting bombing, weeks of hunger and Baghdad's dickering with Moscow about a withdrawal, Iraqi morale evaporated. The Saudi commander, Lieut. General Khalid bin Sultan, said Iraq's soldiers were competent enough, but "they don't believe in what they are fighting...
...ground war proved this. While the coalition achieved victory with a wide, flanking sweep to the west, U.S., Saudi, Egyptian and Syrian divisions struck north from Saudi Arabia. They pushed directly into the Iraqi fortifications where Saddam had wanted to see them. Even there, Iraqi forces put up little resistance...
About half the combatants in the land campaign were non-American: mainly, in descending order of strength, Saudi, Egyptian, British, Syrian and French. The . small gulf sheikdoms -- including Kuwait's government-in-exile -- fielded 11,500 troops with the Saudis, while lesser contingents from 17 other countries carried out some aircraft, ship and behind-the-lines assignments. Most of the 28 coalition members performed noncombat duties or tried, as the 1,700 Moroccan troops did, to stay invisible: their dispatch to Saudi Arabia had become a focus of controversy back home. But Schwarzkopf took pains to tip his forage...