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The Gulf War 1991


Author : Alastair Finlan
Editor : Routledge Date & Place : 2003, New York
Preface : Pages : 77
Traduction : ISBN : 0-415-96852-6
Language : EnglishFormat : 215x280 mm
Theme : History

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The Gulf War 1991


The Gulf War 1991

The Gulf War of 1991 is still one of the most fascinating military campaigns in modern memory. For seven brief months, an awesome array of American military muscle, supported by a coalition of allies, was built up in the Persian Gulf region and then unleashed in a lightning campaign that destroyed the opposition with consummate ease. This was a new type of warfare that captivated spectators by its unprecedented sophistication and firepower. New military terminology was injected into the global vocabulary, for example, ‘stealth planes’ and ‘smart bombs’, which provided a new perspective on warfare: ‘weapons vision’ or video imagery showing munitions hitting targets with absolute precision. It was also a media war that propelled a little-known news company, Cable Network News (CNN), into the pre-eminent position in global communications that it continues to hold today.

The impact of the Gulf War on the subject of international relations was profound. It marked the first major crisis of the new post-Cold-War period that did not stem from the old rivalry between the United States and the Soviet Union. Indeed, the Soviet Union was by then a shadow of its former self, and its reformist leader, Mikhail Gorbachev, was struggling to hold the unwieldy and disintegrating mass together. In Europe, the Iron Curtain had fallen and the oppressed states of eastern Europe stretched out their hands towards capitalism, democracy and, in the case of Germany, unification. For the victorious United States, under the direction of George Bush (Snr), the end of bipolarity offered the world a fresh start, which he idealistically labelled the ‘new world order’, in which international affairs could move away from the debilitating effects of nuclear rivalry, arms races and brinkmanship towards a more harmonious future. Academics like Francis Fukayama argued that the ‘end of history’ had arrived, with the world finally free of the destructive clash of competing ideologies that had dominated the 20th century with such adverse effects. Now, capitalism, supported by liberal democracy, was the only viable way forward, where political systems would rarely, if ever, be incompatible and the future would be a peaceful one...



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