Word: statical
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Cable-TV operators know all about static, but this was something else again. More than 600 local government officials sent a letter to every member of Congress denouncing the cable industry's "monopoly market power" and urging support for legislation that would reform the 1984 law partly deregulating cable...
...trouble is that order is a 19th century term that suggests Metternichian arrangements of large, heavy, somewhat static entities. History in the late 20th century seems to belong more to chaos theory and particle physics and fractals -- it moves by bizarre accelerations and illogics, by deconstructions and bursts of light. It is global history with dangerous simultaneities at work: instantaneous planetary communications coexist with atavistic greeds and hungers, like Saddam Hussein's: CNN looks in upon old, moldy evils. This bizarre new physics of history might well argue for some kind of ordering. But the new world order, the American...
...fight his last war over again. His frontline troops built triangular forts, dug bunkers, sowed minefields, piled up barriers and filled ditches with oil. Attackers were to be channeled into killing zones targeted by Iraqi artillery, which was the strongest weapon Iraq had used against Iran. This time the static defense did not hold. Preoccupied with hanging on to newly conquered Kuwait, Saddam did not extend his fortifications more than a few miles beyond the Saudi-Kuwaiti border. Coalition forces easily outflanked the "Saddam line." Even along the gulf coast, where U.S. and Saudi troops did attack straight north into...
Iraq's field army, committed to the static defense of Kuwait, simply had to dig in and take the pounding. That commitment only intensified after Saddam fell for allied bluffs that a seaborne invasion was coming. After six weeks of bombing, frontline units were isolated, mostly unable to communicate with Baghdad or one another, short of food and water. Many divisions had lost half of their equipment and, more important, their will to fight...
Backing these static deployments are nearby infantry reserves and armored units as well as artillery. Two divisions line the gulf coast north and south of Kuwait City to ward off amphibious landings by U.S. Marines. Farther back, along the Kuwait-Iraq border, are Saddam's best troops: the armored and mechanized divisions of Iraq's Republican Guards, which are now being relentlessly bombed by U.S. B-52s and other allied aircraft...