Word: nato
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...NATO's member nations convene in Bucharest, Romania, to discuss the state of the alliance, Afghanistan will be at the top of the agenda. General Dan McNeil, commander of the alliance's 43,250 soldiers in Afghanistan, has lobbied for another troop surge to help battle the rising insurgency in the country's south. But lower-level commanders on the ground have something else to add to that wish list. Says one: "Frankly, defeating the Taliban is the least of our worries. They are not going to beat us. What is killing this country is corruption and drugs. That...
...easy to take a wrong turn in Bucharest's Palace of the Parliament," says Victor Micula, the Romanian official responsible for organizing this week's NATO summit. Ground was broken for the monstrous, labyrinthine structure, locally nicknamed the "Madman's House," in 1986 on the orders of Nicolae Ceausescu. Work had not yet been completed when Ceausescu was deposed and executed three years later. Indeed, says Micula, the job is still unfinished...
...same applies to NATO, the labyrinthine alliance whose heads of state and government are now meeting in the Palace - and which is also still under construction after 59 years. On Thursday NATO Secretary General Jaap de Hoop Scheffer unveiled a series of decisions reached by the 26 member states that will, he says, "substantially change the Alliance." Yet Scheffer's announcement bitterly disappointed three countries that had hoped to be on a fast track to NATO membership...
...aspiration got lost in the Madman's House because of a long-running but apparently trivial dispute over a name. Macedonia, a former constituent republic of Yugoslavia, had expected to be invited to join NATO alongside Albania and Croatia, another successor state to Communist Yugoslavia. But Macedonia's southern neighbor Greece perceives the name "Macedonia" as a threatened territorial claim on its own northernmost province, which is also called Macedonia. Right up to the wire, some NATO delegates remained optimistic about a solution for the country, which Greece still refers to as the Former Yugoslavian Republic of Macedonia, or, more...
...Although most argue that politics should be kept out of the Games, it is not as though American boycotts of the Olympics are unprecedented. In 1979, the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan. In response, the United States and most other NATO nations boycotted the Moscow Olympics the next year. By reducing the Olympics to a contest between Communist nations, the West was able to express its anger at the Kremlin’s misdeeds. If a host nation’s aggression against a neighbor warrants a boycott, surely a host nation’s aggression against its own people warrants...