Word: pulling
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Lebanon wasn't supposed to turn out this way. In March of last year, President George W. Bush was hailing Lebanon as a shining beacon of his Administration's "democracy agenda" for the Middle East. Close to 1 million Lebanese had flooded into Beirut to demand that Syria pull its troops out of Lebanon and end its 29-year domination of the country. The U.S. State Department coined the protests the Cedar Revolution, a more folksy title than the Lebanese term, Independence Intifadeh, which smacked of radicalism. But with six ministers having resigned since Nov. 11, sectarian tensions rising...
...payback time. Lebanese officials, along with Israeli military sources and Western diplomats, say that while Syrian President Bashar Assad may be willing to help pull the Bush Administration out of the Iraqi quicksand, he hopes to exact concessions that would allow him to treat Lebanon, where the Syrian regime has vast financial interests, as his private turf. And according to these same sources, he is unnerved by a U.N.-sponsored inquiry that implicates top Syrian officials in the February 2005 car bombing that killed former Prime Minister Rafiq Hariri and 22 others. Assad is hoping that the international probe will...
...Bush has never had to pull off a U-turn like the one he is contemplating now: to give up on his dream of turning Babylon into an oasis of freedom and democracy and instead begin a staged withdrawal from Iraq, rewrite the mission of the 150,000 U.S. troops there as they begin to draw down, and launch a diplomatic Olympics across the Middle East and between Israel and the Palestinians. Even calling all that a reversal is a misnomer; it would be more like a personality transplant...
...Watching the premature and apparently unself-conscious aging of the participants, I wonder if, in the fifth or sixth year of each cycle, they say to themselves, "Time to get a rinse, lose a stone or two, pull my marriage together and straighten out my kids." But that may be the bias of an American, relying on the superficial, the lure of eternal adolescence, more than your average Brit...
...analysts are looking to the Dec. 9 mayoral elections in Taipei and Kaohsiung for an indication of how badly the DPP has been wounded, and whether the party's problems could carry on to legislative elections next year and the presidential vote in 2008. "If the DPP could pull it out in either one of those races people would say, 'See, it's not completely over for the DPP, they still have some support and they haven't completely lost their mojo,'" says Shelley Rigger, an expert on Taiwan at Davidson College in North Carolina. "If they lose both, their...