Word: ba
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
DEFINITION nak-ba n: an Arabic word meaning disaster or catastrophe that Palestinians use as shorthand to refer to the time just before and after the creation of the state of Israel, in which approximately 700,000 Palestinian refugees were displaced...
Late Monday evening, dozens of conference attendees - a group drawn primarily from the ranks of former military officers, Ba'athist officials, and the Sunni insurgency - gathered for a catered dinner beside the hotel's outdoor pool. Several, including a high-ranking former military officer now overseeing Ba'athist resistance activities in his region, talked openly, if carefully, about strategy, although some asked that their names be withheld. ("We are not afraid," said the former Iraqi army colonel, as waiters delivered the main course of steak and carrots, "but we do not want to give the [Shi'a] militias justification...
...have each other/ You can stand under my umbrella") owe more to Doris Day than Madonna. But Rihanna, a Barbadian ex--beauty queen who just released her third album, has a special talent for vocal innuendo. She toys with the word umbrella--or, as Rihanna would put it, um-ba-rella, ella, ella--as if she's taking it for a ride on a water bed. It's hard to believe there will be a sexier song this summer...
...some officials in the Pentagon, the accelerating violence simply proved the wisdom of excluding these Ba'athists and ex?army members from the future of Iraq. As late as the spring of 2004, at a meeting in the White House, one of our officers was asked for "out-of-the-box" ideas to stem the violence. He suggested rescinding CPA Proclamation Two and mounting an aggressive campaign to round up former army members and enlist them to help secure Iraq's borders and maintain internal security. As later described to me, a U.S. Army colonel present, who had been...
...Despite the consequences of decisions regarding de-Ba'athification or disbanding of the army, and the inability to use the billions of dollars at our disposal to implement a political strategy that might have succeeded, not much was done to change course. The National Security Council was created in 1947 to force important policy decisions to be fully discussed, developed, and decided on. In this case, however, the NSC did not fulfill its role. The NSC avoided slamming on the brakes to force the discussions with the Pentagon and everyone else that was required in the face of a deteriorating...