Word: dire
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...first, in the hope that if enough Republicans vote against the President's plan in the Senate, it will make G.O.P. members in the House more comfortable about breaking with Bush. Democratic strategists know that, given the electoral math of the 2008 election, the political climate is dire for Senate Republicans. G.O.P. Senators can little afford to support their President on a policy opposed by more than 60% in most polls. A year from now, Senate Republicans will have to defend 21 of the seats they currently hold, compared with only 12 for the Democrats. That helps explain why some...
...reserves - the fourth largest in the world after Saudi Arabia, Canada and Iran - and about 110 trillion cubic feet of natural gas. What is more, much of the oil is relatively easy to reach and cheap to pipe out. There is a catch, however: the infrastructure is in dire shape. Even before this war, rigs and wells had lain rotting for years, since the crippling war with Iran in the 1980s sapped the economy and international sanctions in the 1990s left Iraq in bad need of spare parts. "The consequences have been really quite severe. Things are in bad shape...
...After Saddam's appeal failed, remnants of his Ba'ath Party threatened dire reprisals if the government carried out the death sentence. But such threats had been made throughout the trial, and they have amounted to nothing substantial. Most of the violence in Iraq is now perpetrated by people with no love for the dictator. Even if the Ba'athists were to step up their attacks, there's a good chance they would be lost in the general carnage wrought by Jihadi groups and Shi'ite militias...
...Zionism, the political movement advocating the creation of a Jewish State in Palestine, had been around for a half century before the Holocaust, but it had always been a minority movement among the Jews of Europe. The Holocaust changed that, creating a new sense of dire necessity in which a Jewish State had to fight its way into being. In the war that accompanied Israel's emergence, the Palestinian Arabs who had been two-thirds of the population of Palestine found themselves confined to 22% of its territory (the West Bank and Gaza), and prevented by new Israeli laws from...
...today, but it's very different from denying the Holocaust. The idea that tens of thousands of Eastern European Jews would choose to move to the impossibly harsh environment of an increasingly violent Palestine in the two years after World War II out of anything but a perception of dire necessity reminds me of another myth - albeit a Zionist one - with which I was fed growing up: that Israel's Jewish majority was ensured when hundreds of thousands of Palestinian Arabs had "miraculously" chosen to up and leave their homes in 1948, answering the call by Arab leaders promising that...