Word: guerrillas
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...trying to dispel fears that having removed Saddam's regime, U.S. forces are embroiled in a guerrilla war. "I guess the reason I don't use the phrase guerrilla war is because there isn't one," Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said. The varying groups of resisters "are all slightly different in why they're there and what they're doing." For weeks U.S. commanders have maintained that some of the violence against their forces has been coordinated by Baath Party members, Republican Guard commanders and Fedayeen Saddam operatives who survived the allied push through southern Iraq. U.S. forces conducted Operation...
...regrouping: "Any internal danger is from terrorism and from al-Qaeda organizing from outside." Coalition spokesman Colonel Rodney Davis agrees: "The coalition has degraded what was a formidable force." True enough. But the Taliban have taken what was left of their own army and morphed it into a guerrilla-and-terror outfit. Their goal, says Afghanistan expert Professor Barnett Rubin of New York University's (NYU) Center on International Cooperation, is to "cause enough terror that the foreigners will leave Afghanistan and Afghans will be afraid to collaborate with the government in Kabul, causing it to crumble." That's likely...
...good example: two weeks ago, Bush was asked about the guerrilla resistance in Iraq and said, "Bring 'em on." Kerry's response was two paragraphs of polenta: Bush's words had been "unwise, unworthy of the office" and so forth. As a Vietnam War hero, Kerry had the credentials to go ballistic. He could have said, "No one who's actually been in combat would ever say such a thing. You don't invite the enemy to attack your troops." But he didn't. After July 4, both Kerry and Dean held campaign-strategy retreats-and then staged a nifty...
...Fixing the problems in Iraq, of course, requires that they be accurately diagnosed. One question Administration officials are increasingly fielding is whether the U.S. forces are facing a guerrilla war. At a Pentagon briefing earlier this week, one journalist read out the definition of guerrilla warfare from the Department of Defense's own dictionary of terminology: "Military and paramilitary operations conducted in enemy-held or hostile territory by irregular, predominantly indigenous forces." That, the reporter observed, sounds a lot like the current situation in Iraq. Rumsfeld was barely coherent in his response, talking about "five different things that are going...
...form of sniper fire, roadside bombs and mines, ambushes and close-range gunfire, the weapon of choice among those seeking to kill American soldiers in Iraq appears increasingly to be the RPG-7 rocket launcher. The cheap, portable, recoilless Soviet-designed rocket launcher has long been a favorite of guerrilla armies everywhere, because it evens up the odds against more heavily armed and armored enemies. The Afghans and Chechens have used them to devastating effect against the Russians, and Somali militiamen used one to down a U.S. Blackhawk helicopter in Mogadishu. And they may be an even more attractive option...