Word: lessing
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...dealt fluently with the toughest of questions: the push-me, pull-you issue of sending in 30,000 more troops only to start withdrawing them in July 2011, less than a year after they all arrive. The troops - as many as were involved in the Iraq surge, though in a much smaller war - are being sent to stun the enemy, to turn back recent Taliban advances, especially in Kandahar province, the heartland of the insurgency. But why limit the force of the blow by announcing the date you will begin the withdrawal? "Why wouldn't they wait you out?" asked...
Then he stopped, abruptly. "None of this is easy," he said. "I mean, we are choosing from a menu of options that is less than ideal." Indeed, over the past few months, I've heard members of the Administration make cases for and against each of the decisions the President has made. There is no completely convincing argument that 30,000 - or 40,000 - more troops will turn the tide in Afghanistan; you can make an argument, nearly as plausible, that they will make a bad situation worse - Afghans have, historically, not reacted well to tens of thousands of armed...
...choice about the public part of the program; he is privately furious about the leaks, especially those from the military. "We will deal with that situation in time," an Obama adviser told me. The criticism of the President for dithering is also unfair. This second Afghan strategy review in less than a year was made necessary by an assortment of dramatic new developments on the ground. Each had to be analyzed individually and then correlated with the others. There was the fraudulent election, which stripped the remaining clothes from the Emperor Karzai. There was a big mistake made...
...Jong Il and his cohorts labeled this week's sudden change in the country's currency, which has left chaos in its wake, economic "reform." On Monday the North Korean regime decided to lop off two zeroes from the existing paper currency, the won, and gave North Koreans less than a week to exchange all their old notes for new ones...
...economist at Washington's Peterson Institute of International Economics. However, this being North Korea, one of the most repressive and impoverished nations in the world, that's not the case. The government announced that it would limit the amount an individual can exchange to just 100,000 won - or less than $40 at black-market exchange rates - and any amount above that threshold would be, in effect, worthless. NGOs in Seoul reported that in response to citizens' immediate and widespread anger, those limits were raised to 150,000 won in cash and 500,000 won in bank notes. (See pictures...