Word: ambusher
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...inside out"--a lightning drive on Baghdad to decapitate the regime and then liberate the rest of the country--Saddam has counterattacked from the outside in. He let allied forces plunge deep inside Iraq, leaving their rear and flanks ill protected so that his forces could harass and ambush them. His aim was shrewd and twofold: to pester and wear down allied forces and lure the U.S. into inflicting politically costly civilian casualties...
...Gettysburg, Normandy and Okinawa. When a military operation departed from those norms--as in Vietnam and at the battle of Mogadishu in 1993--it was dismissed as a mistake, the consequence of political meddling rather than a cool decision by the military to use force. In fact, the ambush in Somalia by armed men indistinguishable from peaceable civilians is more relevant to our future than a full shelf of books on the World War II heroics of the "greatest generation." Given the conventional power of the U.S. military, any probable adversary will choose unconventional tactics. The fighting in Afghanistan...
While attention is diverted to the war in Iraq, hostilities in Afghanistan are heating up. In the past three weeks, two special - forces men were killed in an ambush, three Afghan soldiers had their throats slit at a lonely checkpoint, and an international aid worker was gunned down in Uruzgan province. A former top Taliban chief, Mullah Dadullah, told the BBC in a phone interview that the warrior clerics were coming out of hiding to renew their war against Afghan leader Hamid Karzai and the U.S.-led coalition backing him up. Dadullah claimed the clerics are taking orders directly from...
...either because they have political support there or because they terrorize civilians into protecting them. (My guess is that in Iraq today both conditions are met.) So the strong power has to hunt the enemy not on the battlefield but in towns and villages. The risks are twofold: an ambush like that in Mogadishu or a gradual alienation of the local population leading to unbearable political pressure to end a war - which is how the French were forced out of Algeria. In the 1950s, the British perfected antiguerrilla warfare in Malaya, Cyprus and Kenya. But that was before the invention...
...inspector; Powell's presentation of new intelligence on Saddam's WMD capabilities; increasingly frantic British efforts to forge a new resolution that might win a majority of the Council--was no more than flowers on the coffin of Resolution 1441. Powell was furious at the Martin Luther King Day ambush. "He had won an internal debate within the Administration to go to the U.N.," says a Republican Senator. "But the French ratted out on him. That lowered his stock." The next weekend Powell flew to the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, and friends found him despondent. "He was frustrated...