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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: TimF who wrote (138235)	7/20/2001 5:41:46 PM
From: i-node	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1588338

The US, Russia, China, and Germany were unambigiously more powerful Again, while my intent was not to get into a debate on this issue (there is still far too much revisionism going on about the Gulf War to easily research it), I'll concede Germany was in the same category but not "unabigiously" more powerful. Today, Iraq has about 40% of the pre-war military strength. Iraq now has about 400,000 men in its military, consisting of six corps of ground forces with about thirty divisions, 2,200 tanks, 2,500 APCs, and 1,650 artillery pieces, while its air force has about 300 combat aircraft. Iraq no longer has a Navy (but did before the Gulf War). Today they are far and away the most powerful military in the region (Iran has more personnel, but not as well trained or outfitted). While they were weaker than certain other powers in terms of nuclear capability prior to the war, keep in mind they had a massive buildup of weaponry (from us, to a large extent) and a well-trained Republican Guard, not to mention a huge biological weapons capability. If you want to revise my remarks and say, well, we defeated the 5th largest or even 6th largest military, I'll accept that just to keep from researching it. But the point is that, while we had assisted in arming them to the teeth, when they became aggressive against our interests, we soundly defeated them and forever changed the face of war with the United States. History will remember George Bush well for his actions in this matter.

To: TimF who wrote (138235)	7/20/2001 5:45:32 PM
From: combjelly	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 1588338

"I would say that at the time, The US, Russia, China, and Germany were unambigiously more powerful." If you are talking about ground forces, North Korea would have ranked ahead of Iraq. North Korea likely had the edge in equipment, and definitely had an edge in training, if not in numbers. In David's defense though, at the time there was still some question as to how all of our super-slick weaponry would work in actual combat. In retrospect, there should not have been much question since Kuwait was an even better battleground than Europe which much of it was designed to work in. Still, he keeps confusing size and power...