Word: pentagonal
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...responsible for Iraq, told Bush in a video-conference call last Friday that his troops were not seeing Sunni-Shi'ite cooperation in any structural or systematic way. In the south, U.S. forces reclaimed the city of Kut from the short-lived control of al-Sadr's militia. But Pentagon officials warned that the conflict against al-Sadr and his supporters might drag on: the Shi'ite festival of Arbaeen on Sunday attracted hundreds of thousands of worshippers to Karbala and Najaf, where al-Sadr was holed up. U.S. troops would tread carefully there until at least early this week...
...last week Rumsfeld acknowledged for the first time that he might be forced to break his pledge not to keep any U.S. soldiers in Iraq for more than 12 months. With the coalition desperate to quash the Shi'ite insurgency before it spreads, the Pentagon says it will probably delay shipping out some 25,000 soldiers--mostly members of the 1st Armored Division--who have been in the country for a year. Because of scheduled troop rotations, there are 135,000 U.S. soldiers in Iraq, up from 120,000 several weeks ago. An Army officer at Centcom insists that delaying...
...stirred up threatening protests numerous times, his rhetoric spread a dangerous message, and his militia was steadily growing. An Iraqi court charged him with allowing the murder of Abdul-Majid al-Khoei, a U.S.-favored moderate cleric who was hacked to death in April 2003, and by September, the Pentagon had cooked up a plan to seize al-Sadr. But military officials in Baghdad eventually concluded he was a minor player who was gradually being marginalized, his army more phantom than real, his support flagging as the size of his Friday crowds shrank. U.S. officials put the arrest plan...
...fight against fellow Iraqis. And when Iraqi police were confronted by Sadr supporters at towns in the south, many simply walked away from their stations, and some actually joined the rebels. Nor was the performance of some of the Coalition garrison troops in the south particularly encouraging for the Pentagon: They'd been deployed expecting to be doing mostly civil affairs work, and when they found themselves under fire, there were a number of calls for urgent U.S. assistance. Holding the line in Iraq now that confrontations are occurring in the Shiite south, too, is raising pressure...
...resistance by insurgents at Fallujah and Sadr supporters in the south lacks the ability to challenge the U.S. military in a tactical sense - the Pentagon can be pretty sure of winning any battlefield engagement that presents itself in Iraq. But the military also appears to be without political progress, they'll have to fight the same battles again and again. And in the classic dynamic of occupation, insurgency and counterinsurgency, the past week has served as a reminder that fighting those battles always raises the risk of losing the peace by turning even Iraqis who don't support the radicals...