Word: combative
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...When I returned to Iraq in February 2004, the environment had changed dramatically. We flew into Baghdad at night, because you couldn't come in during the day. The C-17 bringing us there made a full-combat landing-a steep dive, quick on the ground. I was seated far forward, wearing flak jacket and helmet. There was no sightseeing this time. In those intervening ten months, Iraq had become a very different place, but not at all in the way that the U.S. government had intended. How did it get that way? Through a series of decisions that...
...Valenti, who died Thursday at 85 from complications of a stroke, seemed a good fit for that antique era. A hardscrabble Texas kid who at 14 had worked as "an usher in a second-run theater in Houston called the Iris," he flew 51 combat missions for the Air Force in World War II, got a Harvard M.B.A. on the GI Bill and hooked up with a back-home politician named Lyndon Johnson. Valenti was the Vice President's press rep on a trip to Dallas in November 1963 and stood next to him on the flight back to Washington...
Self-taught in swordsmanship, hand-to-hand combat and making bombs from clay pots, gunpowder and tar, Smith fought as a young mercenary in wars across France, the Netherlands and southeast Europe to the edge of the Ottoman Empire. Captured and sold into slavery, he wound up at a remote Black Sea military outpost, where a Turkish officer shaved Smith's head and riveted an iron ring around his neck. "A dog could hardly have lived to endure" the routine beatings and starvation rations that followed, Smith wrote in his colorful and epic autobiography...
...York Times and I for United Press International--we were too young to have reputations that might help protect us if our work was challenged. The Saigon regime was weak and corrupt, its troops would not fight, and the American advisers we followed into combat confirmed that we were losing the war. Yet we found ourselves under assault from the commanding general and the ambassador, men who insisted that the U.S. and its Saigon ally were winning. They said we were spreading falsehoods and ought to be fired. Many of our editors doubted us. These Establishment figures still had credibility...
...sustained economic growth is in inadequate resources” said Mulu Ketsela, an executive director with the World Bank Group for 22 African countries. The discussion ranged from the influence of China in various African economies, to the need to implement new technologies such as satellite imagery to combat the widespread problem of power outages in South Africa. The event, co-hosted by the Kennedy School of Government Africa Caucus and the school’s Africa Policy Journal, focused on the economic needs of the continent and sought predictions about Africa’s future. But panelists were hesitant...