Word: shock
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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That's not how the theologians predicted the campaign would unfold. The theory was that the initial display of military might by U.S. warplanes and ground troops would "shock and awe" the Iraqi military and high-ranking officials into the conviction that resistance was futile. The despot's regime, Administration officials insisted, was too "brittle" to survive such an onslaught. Iraqi troops would defect en masse, they suggested. Intelligence and military officers had selected likely turncoats among the military's highest echelons. Just two days before the opening salvo, Richard Perle, a leading war booster on the Pentagon's Defense...
...shock and awe" has failed to deliver a knockout blow thus far. Punishing strikes damaged trappings of Saddam's power but failed to crack the regime. The thunderous barrage didn't break ordinary Iraqis either. Saddam's ghostly appearances on national television convinced his citizens--if not Washington--that he remained in control. Iraqis have endured bombing intermittently for more than 12 years and have learned resilience...
...Fort Bliss, the 507th's home base, shock came first, then silence. No one on the post could tell the families of the dead and missing what had gone wrong, what a cook and a computer specialist, a mechanic and an aspiring elementary school teacher were doing in a convoy so close to battle, so unprotected. The 507th's usual job is to keep diesel tankers rolling, fix generators and service Patriot missile batteries. But it was attacked on March 23, at night, somewhere on or near Highway 1, one of the main north-south roads in Iraq...
...force of primal disorder; we are a society afflicted by the illusion of orderliness. We have been so buffered by the carefully demarcated rules of television that we lack the intellectual equipment to deal with chaos (even the events of 9/11--talk about shock and awe!--were carefully groomed. The most shocking images, the bodies falling from the sky, were generally kept out of view). Afghanistan, Kosovo, the first Gulf War--each a video game played from 15,000 ft.--only added to our delusion of control. We are not so lucky this time. This is an actual war; there...
...Command tells it all. This is going to be a war unlike any other in the history of the world. But what will make this war different will not be the manner in which it is fought, or the tactics that the troops will use (for “shock and awe” is as old as warfare itself), but that never before has a war been produced for a television audience...