Word: schwarzkopf
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...General Norman Schwarzkopf did not march into Kuwait City last week proclaiming "I have returned," it was for two reasons. One was that he had never been driven out. The second was more important: the U.S. commander of Operation Desert Storm wanted the ravaged Arab capital to be liberated by Arabs -- exiled Kuwaitis as well as Saudis and kindred units in the anti-Iraq coalition. So strongly did Schwarzkopf feel about dramatizing the Arab role that he was expected to pass up any uninvited triumphal visit to Kuwait. In 1944 a jut-jawed General Douglas MacArthur had made a point...
...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 cap to the chief partners, all of whose missions he termed "very, very tough...
...unenviable double duty: to deceive Baghdad into thinking that all of the allies were massed for a frontal assault, and to deflect Iraqi defenders from U.S. Marine crossings farther west. The Saudi-led Arab forces "did a terrific job" in breaching "a very, very tough barrier system," Schwarzkopf said, noting that they had been "required to fight the kind of fight that the Iraqis wanted them to." Some Kuwaitis in the Saudi force kissed the earth on returning to home ground and were among those Arabs eventually privileged to be in the vanguard entering Kuwait City...
Later on G day, another Saudi force crossed into southwestern Kuwait, paralleling an Egyptian-led thrust. The 38,500 Egyptians, second in number only to Saudi Arabia's 40,000 among the allies, ran into Saddam's dreaded oil- filled fire trenches, according to Schwarzkopf; though the trenches were not aflame, it was a position the general called "not a fun place to be." Behind Egypt's two-division tank and paratroop contingents was the 19,000-man Syrian 9th Armored Division, with its 270 Soviet-made T-62 tanks. The two- pronged Arab attack took out Iraqi defenders...
...division's task was to accompany U.S. VII Corps armor in destroying the Republican Guard -- specifically, to form an advancing blockade from the west that bottled up the Iraqi forces. Schwarzkopf said the British units performed the job "absolutely magnificently." In addition to the gutsy, low-flying attacks on Iraqi airfields by British pilots early in the air war, Britain's partnership in the ground campaign proved the forces to have been what the U.S. commander called "absolutely superb members of this coalition from the outset...