Word: gradualness
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...brink of a decisive battle for Baghdad," Lieberman said on the Senate floor. But that was wrong too: the counterinsurgency tactics General Petraeus will use are gradual, not "decisive" in the traditional military sense. We are not on the brink of anything except a long hard slog. I suspect Lieberman understands this but is hyping the mission for dramatic effect. If so, he is raising unfair expectations for the troops and the nation. I'd say that comes pretty damn close to undermining the mission...
...congressional majority status, which has its own dynamic too. But in largest part, Bush. He crossed up the Democrats. They expected him to stay the Rumsfeld-Abizaid-Casey course in Iraq. Or, they thought, he might accede to the Iraq Study Group, admit errors and lead us to gradual defeat. Neither would have required Democrats to do anything much except lament the lamentable situation into which Bush had got us. Instead, Bush replaced Rumsfeld, rejected the Iraq Study Group's slow-motion-withdrawal option and chose to try a new strategy for victory, backed by a troop surge. The Democrats...
...With the support of Sinn Fein president Gerry Adams, the proposal was backed overwhelmingly, and it could cement more than a decade of gradual efforts to reconcile Northern Ireland's Catholics, and their aspirations for a united Ireland, with the Protestants who wish to remain part of the United Kingdom. Should the remaining differences be closed in the coming weeks, McGuinness will share power with Rev. Ian Paisley, the 81-year-old hardline unionist leader, as Northern Ireland's First Ministers on March...
Indeed, there are those who believe that the gradual purplification of the West may have dramatic national consequences. If the Democrats can pick off a few Rocky Mountain states to augment their strength in the Northeast, upper Midwest and West Coast, they may be able to build an electoral majority that does not include the ferociously conservative South. As Thomas Schaller of the University of Maryland pointed out after the 2006 elections, "For the first time in more than half a century, the minority party in the South is the majority party in both chambers of Congress." Schaller...
Elkind further indulges his atavism in his new book, The Power of Play, a lamentation on the gradual replacement of toy trucks and dollhouses with "robo pets and battery-operated cars," which "don't leave much to the imagination." (But didn't the toy truck seem outrageously modern to a Victorian who grew up playing with wood blocks and marbles?) Similarly, in its journal this month, the American Academy of Pediatrics protests the ebb of recess, arguing that "undirected play allows children to learn how to work in groups, to share, to negotiate, to resolve conflicts ..." But most schools...