Word: commandment
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Nearly everyone at U.S. central command agreed that the sprawling Faw oil-refining and -shipping facility on Iraq's southeastern coast was a must-seize first-night target in the war on Baghdad--almost as important as killing Saddam Hussein. Capture it early, went the thinking, and the next Iraqi government at least had a chance of getting back on its feet. Ignore it, and Saddam might blow up the facility, flooding the nearby Persian Gulf with crude, compromising Iraq's economy and shutting down critical water-desalination plants all along the Arabian Peninsula...
...special forces, a fabled but mostly misunderstood arm of the U.S. military, didn't win the war in Iraq. But America's secret army, deployed in greater numbers than ever before and working for the first time with the support of the entire chain of command, did as much as the pilots, tankers and artillery to shorten the war. And now, as the U.S. finds itself in a deepening struggle to root out stubborn pockets of resistance and track down Saddam, the Pentagon's most specialized units are again playing outsize roles. Last week Army special forces, along with troops...
Some of the special-forces troops in Iraq had seen it all before--12 years ago, to be exact. Long before the war with Iraq began, officials at the U.S. Special Operations Command in Tampa, Fla., combed service records for names of commandos who had seen action in 1991's Operation Provide Comfort, which gave food and shelter to Kurdish refugees after Saddam crushed their rebellion. The goal: to lure these American soldiers out of private life and back into action. "We wanted them for the places they'd been and the people they knew," said a top officer. Army...
...going to be put on the altar of the road map." Gissin maintains that Sharon's revulsion to terrorist attacks on Jewish civilians dates from the 1950s, when there were frequent lethal penetrations of Israel from the West Bank, then controlled by Jordan. Sharon, a young army officer, took command of Unit 101, a counterterrorism outfit that launched reprisal attacks on Palestinian villages there. In 1953 one such attack on the village of Qibya led to the deaths of 69 people, half of them women and children, and provoked widespread international condemnation...
...SACKED. Shi Yunsheng, Chinese navy commander, and Yang Huaiqing, navy political commissar; over the recent Ming-class No. 361 submarine accident that claimed the lives of all 70 crew members; in Beijing. According to Chinese news agency Xinhua, the admirals were fired for "improper command and action" during the accident, the cause of which is still unknown. The dismissals follow the high-profile sackings of top Chinese officials in April over the mishandling of the SARS outbreak on the mainland...