Word: sept
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...understand Barack Obama's Afghanistan decision, it's instructive to go back to one history-shifting sentence, uttered by his predecessor more than eight years ago. It was Sept. 20, 2001. The nation was in agony, and George W. Bush stood before a joint session of Congress, telling Americans where to direct their rage. "Americans are asking, 'Who attacked our country?'" Bush declared early in his remarks. "The evidence we have gathered all points to a collection of loosely affiliated terrorist organizations known as al-Qaeda." (See pictures of the battle against the Taliban...
...community in and around Minneapolis - to join its battle against Mogadishu's weak interim government. In October 2008, the first known American suicide bomber - a 26-year-old Somali-American fighting with al-Shabab - blew himself up in northern Somalia. In one of the broadest domestic terrorism investigations since Sept. 11, federal officials have charged 14 people with recruiting an estimated 20 Americans to join the radical Islamist group since late 2007. And in its most recent attack, a suicide bomber disguised as a veiled woman killed three Somali government ministers and at least 16 others attending a med-school...
...that cause us to fight, was lovely but abstract: "It is easy to forget that when this war began, we were united - bound together by the fresh memory of a horrific attack ... I refuse to accept the notion that we cannot summon that unity again." Absent the reference to Sept. 11, the closing paragraphs could just as easily have climaxed a speech announcing a campaign against global warming. (See pictures of Obama speaking at West Point...
...know you're hurting, but we're at war. We're trying to stabilize the most dangerous part of the world. We're trying to prevent the collapse of a nuclear state, Pakistan. We're trying to capture and kill the people who massacred our friends and neighbors on Sept. 11, people who represent the purest manifestation of evil in the world. You have to be part of this effort, and no, merely mouthing platitudes in support of the troops is not enough. We all need to sacrifice.(See pictures of the battle in Afghanistan's Kunar province...
...bracing sense of unity that Obama cited in his peroration was achieved reflexively - it was the obvious human reaction after the Sept. 11 attacks. But such unity is difficult to sustain. And it cannot be reignited by mere words or argument, even when the argument and the policy is, I believe, the correct one. The exquisite rationality that attends almost everything this President does is essential, but not enough, when sending young men and women into battle. There needs to be inspiration as well. There is no such thing as a no-drama...