Word: thousands
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...trekked through remote areas in a four-wheel-drive vehicle, explaining to skeptical village chiefs the government's progress in the Timor Sea negotiations and its plans to meet the basic needs of citizens and save half the expected revenues in a fund for future generations - like the thousand young Catholics gathered at a conference in Ermera, a coffee-growing area some 50 km from Dili. It's taken Prime Minister Alkatiri and his escort almost three hours to make the hazardous road journey here, but at the end of his pep talk, he takes 90 minutes of questions...
...once things are calm, we'll truly let you run things. But the Iraqis reply that until they are running things, there will be no calm. It is hard to accept the Pentagon's hearty insistence that the scattered attacks in Iraq are just the work of a few thousand Iraqi dead-enders backed by foreign fighters when so much of the country has become so impossibly dangerous in just the past few weeks--when drivers trying to move around Baghdad, even in the supposedly safe neighborhoods, now run into checkpoints manned by insurgents looking for foreigners to confront...
When Eric Shinseki, then the Army Chief of Staff, testified publicly before the war that it could take "several hundred thousand troops" to occupy Iraq, he found himself a general non grata, and the rest of the brass got the message. A year later, junior officers are no longer holding their tongues. "He wants to wage a war consistent with this fantasy of what a war is rather than what it is in reality," an Army officer at the Pentagon says privately of Rumsfeld. "It's this bulls___ notion that you can have an efficient military instead of an effective...
...four U.S. security contractors in the city in March set the stage. The U.S. vowed to bring the perpetrators to justice. Marines surrounded the city, imposed a curfew and engaged in a pitched battle with what the White House now says could be as many as "a few thousand" insurgents. Hopes for a peaceful resolution fluttered when Iraqi civic leaders helped broker a cease-fire: if the insurgents would surrender their heavy weapons, the Marines would pull back from their cordon. The U.S. even offered to let Iraqi officers from Fallujah lead patrols there...
...among senior military officers about Britain's role in Iraq's occupation, now being amplified by the urgent U.S. request for more troops. The Pentagon has suggested that Brits replace the 1,300 Spanish soldiers now going home by expanding their occupation zone. Saying yes would require dispatching several thousand British soldiers to Iraq. Blair's strong instinct is to accede. But British officers fear that what one calls the "Fort Apache tactics" of American forces, most notably in Fallujah before last week's pullout, are starting to suck the country into a spiral of bloody resistance and bloodier response...