Word: boxers
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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California Senator Barbara Boxer almost asked a good question at the Petraeus-Crocker festivities on Capitol Hill this week. She was reminiscing, as most of her colleagues did, about time spent on the ground in Iraq with General David Petraeus, but it was not a recent visit. It was back in 2005, when Petraeus was in charge of training the new Iraqi army. An aide pulled out a blown-up photograph of the Senator and the general. "You were so upbeat, General," Boxer said. "You said, 'You're about to see some terrific troops.'" There were 100,000 of them...
...unasked question was so profound that Petraeus, a proud man, chose to answer it anyway. "I believe that my optimism back when I showed those very fine Iraqi forces to Senator Boxer was justified," he said. The good work was undone, though, in 2006, when Shi'ite militias "hijacked" whole units of the Iraqi military. But, he insisted, we are back on the right track now. Petraeus may well be right-or maybe not. The nature of military leadership is congenital optimism; officers are trained to complete the mission, to refuse to countenance the possibility of failure. That focus...
...That's not nearly enough, of course. There was an important follow-up that Boxer didn't ask either: Without a strong, credible central government, for whom exactly is the re-retrained Iraqi army fighting? How can any Iraqi be loyal to a government that doesn't exist? And, finally, now that the Sunnis have decisively rejected the extremists, why should any American trooper sacrifice even a pinkie in this sectarian catastrophe...
...collection of 940 Army Corps of Engineers projects, including $3.5 billion for post-Katrina Louisiana and $2 billion for the Florida Everglades. The House passed it Wednesday night in a 381-40 squeaker, and the Senate vote should be similar; archliberal Senate Environment and Public Works Committee Chair Barbara Boxer of California and archconservative ranking Republican James Inhofe of Oklahoma can't agree on the color of the sky, but they're both pledging to override a veto...
...attached as a rider to the Senate's version of the FAA reauthorization bill. "Never again, if this bill passes, will someone have to sit on a plane for hours and hours without access to potable water, food and adequate restroom facilities," says Natalie Ravitz, press secretary for Senator Boxer...