Word: pentagonal
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...George W. Bush has told Americans that he would increase the number of troops in Iraq only if the commanders on the ground asked him to do so. It was not a throwaway line: Bush said it from the very first days of the war, when he and Pentagon boss Donald Rumsfeld were criticized for going to war with too few troops. He said it right up until last summer, stressing at a news conference in Chicago that Iraq commander General George Casey "will make the decisions as to how many troops we have there." Seasoned military people suspected that...
...last fall in the pages of the Weekly Standard, the neocons' house organ, after the military's previous surge, Operation Forward Together, failed in late October. Kagan turned to former Army Vice Chief of Staff Jack Keane, a retired four-star general who still has street cred at the Pentagon, to help flesh out the plan and then sell it to the White House. The neocons don't have the same juice they had at the start of the war, in part because so many of them have fled the government in shame. But they are a long way from...
...troops at the problem. He began executing his pivot quietly. First, after reassuring Americans that he would ask for more troops only when the generals requested them, Bush amended that promise and hinted that he would merely listen to what the generals were saying. Bush next sent his new Pentagon boss, Robert Gates, to Baghdad to see whether the Iraqi commanders needed more troops. Bush then turned to his National Security Adviser, Stephen Hadley, to hack this new way out of the Iraqi jungle...
...spring with organized campaigns aimed at transforming Sunni neighborhoods into Shi'ite strongholds. But U.S. patience may be coming to an end in the wake of the execution of Saddam Hussein, whose passing left Sadr as the one visible face of opposition to American efforts in Iraq. A Pentagon report released in December described the Mahdi Army as the main threat to stability in Iraq. And the U.S. military upped the stakes with Sadr during a recent raid against the Mahdi Army in Najaf, where U.S. forces killed a senior Sadr aide, Sahib al-Amiri, in the same...
...Allowing Afghans to build that house themselves is the goal of an ambitious plan unveiled at the Pentagon late last year by General Karl Eikenberry, commander of U.S. forces in Afghanistan, and Afghan Defense Minister Abdul Rahim Wardak. It calls for the establishment of a fully functioning army three years ahead of the schedule originally envisaged. "The formula for success in Afghanistan is to enable the Afghan national security forces to defend the Afghan people," Wardak told the press conference. But armies take years to build, and Wardak is looking to double the current troop numbers...