Word: guerrillas
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...strong" power, guerrilla wars are extraordinarily demanding. Guerrillas typically melt away into the general population, either because they have political support there or because they terrorize civilians into protecting them. (My guess is that in Iraq today both conditions are met.) So the strong power has to hunt the enemy not on the battlefield but in towns and villages. The risks are twofold: an ambush like that in Mogadishu or a gradual alienation of the local population leading to unbearable political pressure to end a war--which is how the French were forced out of Algeria. In the 1950s...
...just the armed forces that will have to adapt to guerrilla warfare. So will the public. Americans like their wars to have clean endings, with ticker-tape parades and a memorial on the Mall in Washington. But guerrilla wars aren't like that. Parents of fighting men in the old colonial powers got used to hearing that their sons had died in sordid skirmishes whose names nobody had heard of or--like the six Americans killed when their helicopter crashed in Afghanistan last week--in accidents far from home. Guerrilla warfare may have fine American antecedents, but we have always...
...soldiers of Charlie Rock have learned to treat every Iraqi they come across as a potential enemy. The unit's commander, Captain Jorge Melendez, 31, thinks the guerrilla attacks will continue sporadically for "two or three months." Mitchell had hoped to be back in the U.S. by mid-April after three months in Kuwait, but he has resigned himself to a long, frustrating and bloody haul. "I've stopped telling her when I think I'll be home," says Mitchell, pointing to the picture of his wife Melina and son Garrett, 10, that is strapped to the outside...
...revealing moment. Clearly Bush meant to remind the world of his determination to finish off Saddam's regime, but his impatient tone simultaneously underscored that the task was proving more difficult than many had anticipated. The allied wave of steel pushing into Iraq had been slowed by sandstorms and guerrilla attacks. Civilian casualties were adding up. Having apparently survived the U.S.'s first-day attempt to kill him, Saddam seemed to be in command...
...aversion to suffering losses and inflicting civilian casualties has helped Saddam's small bands of loyalists cling to control of the cities, from which they hope to drag the U.S. into a frustrating, Vietnam-style guerrilla conflict. "People say to me, 'You are not the Vietnamese. You have no jungles and swamps to hide in,'" Iraq's Deputy Prime Minister Tariq Aziz told one interviewer last year. "I reply, 'Let our cities be our swamps and our buildings be our jungles...