Word: commande
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...Karrada district of Baghdad. "Most people around here don't believe they're dead." But the ferocity of the resistance mounted inside the mansion suggested that the brothers had no interest in giving up. Sanchez said the option of pressing harder for a surrender was considered and rejected by commanders on the spot, without intervention from senior officials at Central Command or in Washington. "You could say we should have got them alive," says Russell. "But this way it's clean. There's a finality...
...would be hard to design a more tragically absurd war than the one raging in Liberia. Battles are fought mainly by untrained, doped-up kids from the countryside, and no one on either side has effective command of the ragtag militias. The majority of casualties are civilian. Most combatants avoid fighting, preferring to spray bullets at the other side and then run. The rebels' only stated goal is the ouster of President Charles Taylor, a recently indicted war criminal who insists he is willing to step down and go into exile in Nigeria but keeps creating excuses to postpone...
This should not be surprising. Fighting wars is a difficult business. Success depends on an identity of goals between soldiers and their political masters, and a clear chain of command. That's hard to achieve when a force is made up of various nationalities. Even friends don't always agree. There are no closer allies than the U.S. and Britain, but when U.S. General Wesley Clark, then Supreme Commander of NATO forces, asked the British in June 1999 to stop Russian troops from taking control of Pristina airport at the end of the Kosovo war, London bluntly refused. (The precise...
...fighting is exactly what's still needed. The model to aim for is an improved version of the one the international community stumbled on in Sierra Leone three years ago. A ragtag multinational U.N. mission policed relatively peaceful areas of the nation, while an independent British force outside U.N. command crushed a rebellion with efficient gusto. In Iraq it is possible to imagine a situation in which a U.N. force, with help from retrained Iraqi soldiers and police, would keep the peace in Kurdistan, where the war against Saddam Hussein was always popular, and in the largely Shi'ite south...
...other year, India and Pakistan would be on the verge of war by now. Last week, Islamic guerrillas in Kashmir killed six Hindu pilgrims and eight Indian army officers, injured 60 more people and came within a grenade's throw of wiping out India's entire northern military command. With a Hindu nationalist government in New Delhi and an equally nationalistic general in power in Islamabad, such provocations would usually be sufficient to push the countries to the brink of nuclear disaster...