Word: abizaid
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 2000-2009
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...John Abizaid, the Centcom commander, laid out a laundry list of concerns to the Senate Armed Services Committee last March. While Abizaid spoke about the Horn of Africa, the threats stretch across much of the continent. "The Horn of Africa is vulnerable to penetration by regional extremist groups, terrorist activity, and ethnic violence. Al-Qaeda has a history of planning, training for, and conducting major terrorist attacks in this region, such as the bombings of U.S. Embassies in Kenya and Tanzania. The volatility of this region is fueled by a daunting list of challenges, to include extreme poverty, corruption, internal...
...Abizaid did point out that the small operation in Djibouti has produced bang for the buck: "Working closely with U.S. Embassy personnel in the region, CJTF-HOA assists partner governments in building indigenous capacity to deny terrorists access to their territory. This not only includes training local security and border forces, but also involves assisting with low-level civic projects throughout HOA such as digging wells, building schools and distributing books, and holding medical and veterinary clinics in remote villages." These efforts, Abizaid said, engender goodwill and help "discredit extremist propaganda and bolster local desires and capabilities to defeat terrorists...
...shrine in Samarra. By the time U.S. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld made his latest visit to Baghdad last month, the assessment was more realistic. General George Casey, the U.S. commander in Iraq, told Rumsfeld that Shi'ite death squads were catalyzing a surge in sectarian violence. And General John Abizaid, the top U.S. commander in the Middle East, told a Senate committee in Washington last week that if the sectarian violence continued to spiral, Iraq "could move toward civil...
Getting Gen. John Abizaid, the Pentagon's top Middle East commander, to admit at a Thursday hearing that it's possible Iraq "could move toward a civil war" wasn't the only coup Senate Democrats scored. The same day they also managed to plant another political time bomb, which could explode in the next three or four months over George Bush's conduct of the war, by winning approval for a new National Intelligence Estimate focusing on Iraq's growing sectarian violence...
...Bush signs the defense bill into law, likely at the end of September. Negroponte's spokeswoman did not say when he will complete the document. Even so, war critics believe the secret estimate (an unclassified summary must also be released) will have a powerful impact whenever it's finished. Abizaid's testimony was "extraordinary," says a Senate Democratic aide, but news coverage of it "disappears the next day. An NIE has more impact because everybody would jump on it for a longer time...