Word: inflicting
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Poisoning your enemy's well is an ancient tradition, but would-be terrorists would find it extremely hard to inflict widespread casualties through our water supply. Chlorine in treated water kills most microbes, and huge quantities of chemical toxins would have to be dumped into a reservoir to make many people sick, let alone kill them. (A U.N. study estimated that it would take 10 tons of potassium cyanide.) Drinking water might be threatened locally, however, if someone managed to tap the pipe going into a building or neighborhood or infiltrate a water-treatment facility. With this threat in mind...
...businesses and consumers when Islamic radicals fly airplanes into the twin totems of global prosperity? We don't know, because nothing even remotely similar has ever happened. How will America fight this battle? Ditto. Will the terrorists fight back? If they do, how much more pain will they inflict on the markets? They don't teach Terrorism 101 in business school. In the wake of the attacks, analysts across Asia slashed their GDP growth forecasts to reflect market "uncertainties." The Daiwa Institute of Research in Tokyo, for example, says Japan's anemic economy will shrink by 0.1% this year, rather...
...music to American ears, to others' they are tantamount to a war cry and smack of vengeance. Just after the attack, there was worldwide sympathy for the U.S. With the recent rhetoric, however, it is morphing into a sense of concern that an American-led all-out war could inflict further, heavy, unnecessary civilian casualties. We strongly oppose terror, but we aren't ready to support such a response...
...Force colonel, "was an object lesson to military planners around the globe of the futility of attempting to confront the U.S. symmetrically, that is, with like forces and orthodox tactics." The attacks on the World Trade Center were classic examples of "asymmetric" warfare, using small fanatical teams to inflict maximum psychological damage on a chained Gulliver. And there isn't an army in the rich world that knows, with confidence, how to defeat such a foe. "When you're fighting someone who wants to die," says a Marine colonel, "those old-fashioned rules of war seem rather quaint...
...very little by way of conventional military power. Estimates of the number of men under arms in his Afghanistan camps at any one point seldom range above 2,000. But those men are extremely well-trained, well-funded and have shown a fanatical willingness to die in order to inflict pain on their enemies. Technology and globalization have made their reach almost boundless, and they are linked to a vast network of terrorist groups throughout the Muslim world from western China and the Philippines all the way across to Algeria...