Serious attempts

Usage examples of efforts.

Unfortunately, Kuwait is within range of Iraqi Scuds launched from as far away as the Baghdad area, and we would have to hope that the combination of our aerial Scud-hunting efforts and several batteries of the latest Patriot missiles deployed to Kuwait would take care of whatever Saddam tried to launch before he went down in defeat.

Saddam plays these different groups off against one another in his usual efforts to build redundancy and divide and conquer.

On top of these financial costs, we would also face the diplomatic costs of fighting with our trade partners over the secondary sanctions, fighting constantly in the Security Council over Washington usurping the prerogatives of the United Nations, and resisting French, Russian, and Chinese efforts to make us pay a price for our unilateralism.

This leaves the door open for further efforts by Iraq and its advocates to hamstring and water down UNMOVIC.

The CIA developed an extremely conservative new covert action plan that, above all else, ensured that an operation would not blow up in its face, and it resisted efforts to do anything else.

Southern Europe, particularly Spain, Italy, and Greece, tends to line up with the French in favoring a lifting of virtually all sanctions and opposing efforts toward regime change.

However, the Saudis and Kuwaitis continue to see the maintenance of the southern no-fly zone as vital to their security, and they have resisted all efforts to bring the NFZs to an end.

In actuality, it would not be all that cheap, and if there is one thing we should have learned from our long confrontation with Saddam, it is that efforts to overthrow him on the cheap have never worked.

Moreover, the vast logistical efforts of the Allies had been possible only because of the enormous supplies of oil available to them.

Iraq had paid a terrible price for its meager victory and had little to show for its efforts except a vast military machine.

Saddam was so confident that his strategy would work that he never really took seriously the international efforts to negotiate a settlement to the crisis.

Thus the administration stuck with the comprehensive sanctions designed to force Saddam out of Kuwait, started up a covert action program to encourage opposition efforts to remove him, and employed limited doses of force to further undermine his support inside Iraq.

Knowing what we know today--that the early post-Gulf War efforts to remove Saddam would fail--there is little doubt that Washington would have played its hand differently in 1991.

In addition, they argued that even if efforts at regime change did not succeed in removing Saddam from power, they would invariably keep pressure on him--and as long as he was preoccupied with his own internal security, he would be less able to challenge containment.

The Pentagon was less than enthusiastic about contributing to other, longer-shot efforts at regime change under those circumstances.