Word: pentagonal
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...Iraq there's no such thing as a quick recovery. The Americans promise the Iraqis that once things are calm, we'll truly let you run things. But the Iraqis reply that until they are running things, there will be no calm. It is hard to accept the Pentagon's hearty insistence that the scattered attacks in Iraq are just the work of a few thousand Iraqi dead-enders backed by foreign fighters when so much of the country has become so impossibly dangerous in just the past few weeks--when drivers trying to move around Baghdad, even...
...dead soldiers, wrapped tight like a gift in the flag for which they fought. You could mourn the one whose name was familiar, the football star who took a million-dollar pay cut to defend his country after 9/11. You could listen, for the first time, to the Pentagon leaders admitting that they would need both more troops and more money to get the job done. A year ago, the war planners figured that 200 armored humvees would be enough for the invasion and occupation of Iraq; now they want 20 times that many. The U.S. death toll in April...
...grata, and the rest of the brass got the message. A year later, junior officers are no longer holding their tongues. "He wants to wage a war consistent with this fantasy of what a war is rather than what it is in reality," an Army officer at the Pentagon says privately of Rumsfeld. "It's this bulls___ notion that you can have an efficient military instead of an effective...
...than that - and their letter reflects the anxieties of many serving diplomats and MPs as well. Still more worrisome for Blair is the growing unease among senior military officers about Britain's role in Iraq's occupation, now being amplified by the urgent U.S. request for more troops. The Pentagon has suggested that Brits replace the 1,300 Spanish soldiers now going home by expanding their occupation zone. Saying yes would require dispatching several thousand British soldiers to Iraq. Blair's strong instinct is to accede. But British officers fear that what one calls the "Fort Apache tactics" of American...
...question of using force at Fallujah and Najaf, and he angered Israel and its supporters this week by describing Israeli policies and their support by the U.S. as "the great poison in the region" that complicates his work. Brahimi has also been attacked by former Pentagon favorite Ahmed Chalabi of the Iraqi Governing Council - the IGC figure least likely to be included in Brahimi's list for a provisional government - for being an "Arab nationalist." Then again, the U.S. is unlikely to find anyone capable of arbitrating the increasingly complex politics of Iraq at the same time as professing enthusiasm...