Word: clocked
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...commanders in Iraq seem to sense some new horror for the country is near. On July 7, Gen. David Petraeus predicted that insurgents would lash out with spectacular attacks in the coming weeks, as the clock runs down on time ahead of the September progress report due in Washington. And yesterday Maj. Gen. Rick Lynch, the commander of U.S. forces in southern Iraq, echoed the fear when talking to reporters in the Green Zone. "We're concerned about some kind of Tet offensive that's going to affect the debate in Washington," Lynch said, harking back to the pivotal...
...years become a recognizable icon in the world of international counter-terrorism: the dapper, pipe-smoking, sleuth whose doggedness and efficiency hunting terror masterminds forced him to pack a Magnum to fend off attacks on his own life. (In recent years, he's swapped the gun for round-the-clock bodyguards, although the nickname it earned him, "The Sheriff," has stuck.) He was known as a hands-on investigator who would literally picked through wreckage of a downed airliner, or rent a boat to enter Libya to investigate the agents he accused of blowing it up. And in 1996, Bruguiere...
...Soon after arriving in Iraq, Petraeus invented a formulation that has since become a cliché: the disparity between the two "clocks" - Washington and Baghdad time - for ending the war. The Washington clock is "late fourth quarter, we're down a touchdown, and the other team has the ball," a senior Administration official told me. Petraeus knows that the American public is tired of the war - tired of not winning it, at least - and that a significant chunk of the Republicans in Congress may be about to abandon President Bush, as the respected Senator Richard Lugar did on June...
...There is another clock, not often mentioned, that sits in the Pentagon. It is the Broken Army clock, the service timeline for an exhausted force. Petraeus and his staff were deeply concerned when rumors of another tour extension, from the current 15 months for soldiers, spread in mid-June. "It would be a last resort," Secretary of Defense Robert Gates told reporters - but troop morale is so iffy that Petraeus quietly urged his commanders to "get the word out" to their soldiers that the extension rumors were false...
...According to the Broken Army clock, troop levels will begin to wane in March 2008, no matter what Congress decides in September; the current 20 brigade combat teams will be reduced to 15 by August 2008. There is growing speculation in the military that Bush will try to pre-empt the Petraeus testimony by announcing a gradual drawdown from 20 to 15 combat brigades later this summer. "As if that isn't going to happen anyway," a senior officer told me. "But it may give us some political breathing space" - that is, it may subvert the Democrats' calls...