Word: fig
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...rather than kick them down. Third, this is no longer an insurgency; it's a civil war. Counterinsurgency tactics are designed to help a credible indigenous government fight a guerrilla opponent. The idea that Nouri al-Maliki's government is responsible is laughable: it's little more than a fig leaf for Shi'ite militias. Finally, as Mosul shows, these tactics require lots of time. I asked a leading active-duty Army counterinsurgency expert how long it would take before we knew if the surge had succeeded. "Ten years," he said. That's not a surge. It's a glacier...
...rather than kick them down. Third, this is no longer an insurgency; it's a civil war. Counterinsurgency tactics are designed to help a credible indigenous government fight a guerrilla opponent. The idea that Nouri al-Maliki's government is responsible is laughable: it's little more than a fig leaf for Shi'ite militias. Finally, as Mosul shows, these tactics require lots of time. I asked a leading active-duty Army counterinsurgency expert how long it would take before we knew if the surge had succeeded. "Ten years," he said. That's not a surge. It's a glacier...
...NATO in Afghanistan has become an institutional fig leaf for an ad hoc and unstable coalition of the willing. The crux of the Atlantic alliance is its mutual defense clause, the all-for-one principle, in which an attack on any member is considered an attack on them all. But that clause's limitations were first displayed after Sept. 11, 2001, when it was invoked in the immediate aftermath of the terrorist attacks on New York and Washington, only to be spurned by a Bush Administration set on keeping tight reins on its response...
...electrician at Nyborg Electric on 40th Street, in Manhattan's garment district. He was put in charge of servicing the showrooms of clothing firms, giving him a peek at fashion design in process. At night he moonlighted as a salesman at a Greenwich Village clothing boutique called Fig Leaf that was open until 2 a.m. Tahari began making suggestions to the owner about items that he thought would sell. Many of them, including the tube top, took off. Tahari realized he had an eye for fashion trends...
...roughly 700 men is the most dramatic step taken so far by Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki's government to deal with its corrupt and inept security forces. But TIME's correspondents in Baghdad, Aparisim Ghosh and Brian Bennett, warn that this may be no more than a fig leaf, designed to shore up al-Maliki's political standing, rather than the start of a substantial cleanup...