| DIPLOMAT | "The best bunker buster" according to Scott Ritter, a UN weapons inspector in Iraq in the 1990s |
| HANS | Former UN weapons inspector Blix |
| BOMB | Bunker buster |
| SADDAMHUSSEIN | Iraqi leader captured by US forces in 2003 and executed in Iraq in 2006 (6,7) |
| SCUD | Soviet-made surfaceto-surface missile used by Iraq in the 1990-91 Gulf War (4) |
| USO | Kind of tour Robin Williams did in Iraq in 2003: abbr. |
| SUMERIAN | US marine served in Iraq in former times (8) |
| IRAN | Country that fought Iraq in the 1980s |
| RITTER | Outspoken 1990s weapons inspector Scott |
| BATTLE | With 35-Down, Korea in the 1950s or Iraq in the 2000s |
| PEACEPRIZE | Nobel honour awarded to Canada's (future) Prime Minister Lester B. Pearson in 1957 "for his crucial contribution to the deployment of a United Nations Emergency Force in the wake of the Suez Crisis" o |
| BLUEBERET | Referring to the hats they wear, what nickname is given to a member of a UN peacekeeping force? (4,5) |
| LOSS | Ryan Phillippe comes home, only to have the Army send him back to Iraq in 08's Stop-____. |
| DESERTSTORM | Name applied to the sustained aerial bombardment of Iraq in early 1991 (6,5) |
| KUWAIT | Middle Eastern country invaded by Iraq in 1990, leading to the Gulf War (6) |
| ISIS | Jihadist organisation that proclaimed a short-lived caliphate in Syria and Iraq in 2014 (4) |
| CHAD | In which country did Irish Army personnel serve in a UN peacekeeping mission between 2008 and 2010? (4) |
| DREAR | Like the November sky, to Scott |
| REPRIEVE | Grant a stay of execution to Scott taken out of retrospective (8) |
| EASTOFEDEN | Steinbeck's sequel, seemingly, to Scott Fitzgerald's This Side of Paradise? (4,2,4) |
