Word: pinpricked
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Rollback is, of course, a cold war term. For decades our approach to Islamic terrorism was like our approach to communism: containment. Do not invade its territory, but keep it, as Clinton liked to say of Saddam, "in a box." We tried containing al-Qaeda with a few pinprick bombings and an attack on a pharmaceutical factory in Sudan. These were nothing but an evasion, a looking the other way. Sept. 11 proved the folly of that approach. President Bush therefore announced a radically new doctrine. We would no longer contain. We would attack, advance and destroy any government harboring...
What felt very necessary to the outraged President was a military response, so he asked the Pentagon his options for immediate air strikes. But with intelligence offering nothing more than a pinprick--"We could have only made the rocks bounce," a military source says--Bush started working the phones. He called Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, who refused to leave the burning Pentagon, and said they would hunt down and punish those responsible. He turned to a CIA officer and passed on a message for CIA Director George Tenet. "If Tenet has something"--such as news of another attack--"I want...
Kennedy Fugewane, a cheerful, elderly volunteer counselor, sits in an empty U.S.-funded clinic that offers fast, pinprick blood tests in Francistown, Botswana, pondering how to break through the silence. This city suffers one of the world's highest infection rates, but people deny the disease because HIV is linked with sex. "We don't reveal anything," he says. "But people are so stigmatized even if they walk in the door." Africans feel they must keep private anything to do with sex. "If a man comes here, people will say he is running around," says Fugewane, though he acknowledges that...