Word: spectacularisms
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...commanders in Iraq seem to sense some new horror for the country is near. On July 7, Gen. David Petraeus predicted that insurgents would lash out with spectacular attacks in the coming weeks, as the clock runs down on time ahead of the September progress report due in Washington. And yesterday Maj. Gen. Rick Lynch, the commander of U.S. forces in southern Iraq, echoed the fear when talking to reporters in the Green Zone. "We're concerned about some kind of Tet offensive that's going to affect the debate in Washington," Lynch said, harking back to the pivotal...
That is not true. The group doing the most spectacular bombings in Iraq was named al-Qaeda in Mesopotamia by its founder, Abu Mousab al-Zarqawi, now deceased, in an attempt to aggrandize his reputation in jihadi-world. It is a sliver group, representing no more than 5% of the Sunni insurgency. It shares a philosophy, but not much else, with the real al-Qaeda, which operates out of Pakistan. In fact, al-Qaeda in Mesopotamia has been criticized in the past by the operational director of the real al-Qaeda, Ayman al-Zawahiri, for its wanton carnage directed...
When it became apparent that last month's car bomb attack on Glasgow airport had failed to wreak its intended carnage, people in Scotland felt able to relax, to relish even some of the slapstick quality of the attack's spectacular failure...
...directorial appetite for catastrophe. Telling him something's impossible is like inviting Paris Hilton to a party. He'll be on the next flight to Doomsville, as when he read that a volcano was to erupt on Guadeloupe; off he went to tempt death and came back with the spectacular documentary La Soufrière. On the Amazon epic Fitzcarraldo, he took his crew hundreds of miles from the nearest city and had them lug a 320-ton riverboat overland and up steep hills. He found a suitably lush location on the Amazon and ran into the longest dry spell...
...Unlike Casey, Petraeus seems to have had a moment to seize. A good chunk of the Sunni insurgency has turned against al-Qaeda in Iraq, the fringe group - it comprises no more than 5% of the insurgency, according to U.S. intelligence estimates - that is responsible for the most spectacular bombings. The anti-Qaeda rebellion began in Anbar, formerly the most dangerous province in the country, an area famously described as "lost" to the terrorists in a Marine intelligence report leaked to the press in 2006. "Actually, the first tentative steps in Anbar were taken in 2005," Petraeus told me over...