Word: conflicted
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...deception brought on by an unusually positive historical continuum. First, America and the Allies won World War II; then, 45 years later, with the fall of the Berlin Wall, we defeated communism too. After that, maybe we believed the world would be forever free of conflict. Some thinkers called it the end of history. Well, history did not die. It came roaring back. The old conflicts did indeed wither, but new and virulent ones arose...
Take the vexing and costly war we are waging against al-Qaeda and its ilk. This is a conflict that was barely on the radar in the 1990s - which is exactly the problem. By most accounts, Osama bin Laden founded his organization sometime between 1988 and 1990. The U.S., in part, helped create this loathsome band itself by funding the mujahedin, who fought the Soviets in Afghanistan in the 1980s and provided much of the training for bin Laden's foot soldiers. But our friendly freedom fighters turned into foes. In 1992 al-Qaeda bombed a hotel in Yemen, hoping...
...Qaeda was readying a big strike, only to be marginalized, causing him to leave the bureau. Another prescient voice was that of Harvard professor Samuel Huntington, whose book The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order suggested that culture and religion would be the sources of conflict in the post-Cold War world. Huntington didn't limit this to war between the West and Islam, though he did single out "Islamic civilization" as potentially having significant friction points with the West because of its population explosion and the rise of religious fundamentalism. (See pictures of a jihadist...
...been nearly seven years since the British government decided to join the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq despite vocal opposition from antiwar activists at home, as well as a host of countries around the world. Years later, the bloody conflict, which claimed the lives of 179 British soldiers, remains deeply divisive in Britain. Revelations about former Prime Minister Tony Blair's intentions in the run-up to the war, as well as the views of military commanders during the fighting, continue to make front-page headlines and dominate the national debate...
...inquiry into the war - the most sweeping to be undertaken by any nation involved in the invasion - may finally help Britain put the conflict to rest. The so-called Iraq inquiry is nominally charged with suggesting how to avoid making mistakes in future conflicts, but many Brits believe it has the potential to evolve into a sort of truth and reconciliation commission. Although legally nonbinding, the inquiry will over the course of the next 18 months focus on three of the most contentious aspects of the war: the circumstances surrounding the flawed intelligence-gathering that led to the conflict...