Word: pentagonal
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...point, the president appeared to inch closer toward military involvement, saying that the U.S. would "participate" in the peace keeping process, but then insisted that he had not made up his mind on what form that participation would take. Only after he receives a report from a Pentagon team that arrived in Monrovia on Monday to assess the need for assistance, will he make his decision, say White House officials...
...week, it seems clear that the situation in Iraq is getting worse. What's unclear is whether the attacks are part of an organized resistance to the American occupation. When the enemy was Saddam and his armed forces, resistance was easy to understand; now it's not. In the Pentagon, officials are nervously revisiting their earlier assumption that the resistance was haphazard and spontaneous. "It may have begun that way," says a senior Pentagon official, "but as these attacks grow more numerous, you get the sense that there's someone pulling the strings at a higher level." There is little...
...chaotic conditions at the stadium appalled the intelligence official and a Pentagon source who accompanied him there. The men saw young boys being held at gunpoint, kneeling in the hot sand. An Army sergeant, asked why a boy was being detained, replied, "He was caught riding on the back of a stolen bicycle." Says the intelligence source: "This kind of treatment would never be tolerated in the U.S., so why here? Aren't we supposed to be showing them a different way?" Hamoudi, who eventually made it to Jordan, says the American soldiers who arrested him stole two wristwatches...
...best when they move in small groups, mingling with the local population, stopping to drink coffee and share a smoke, listening for that key bit of gossip about where the local party chieftain is hiding. But because the Iraqi opposition is going after the "onesies and twosies," says a Pentagon official, U.S. troops will be tempted to hunker down and stay in large groups, protected by vehicles and the full battle rattle of helmets and body armor. You can't collect intelligence that...
...Fixing the problems in Iraq, of course, requires that they be accurately diagnosed. One question Administration officials are increasingly fielding is whether the U.S. forces are facing a guerrilla war. At a Pentagon briefing earlier this week, one journalist read out the definition of guerrilla warfare from the Department of Defense's own dictionary of terminology: "Military and paramilitary operations conducted in enemy-held or hostile territory by irregular, predominantly indigenous forces." That, the reporter observed, sounds a lot like the current situation in Iraq. Rumsfeld was barely coherent in his response, talking about "five different things that are going...