Word: troop
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...tactical idea of the season. The debate over a surge is now under way - both about how big to make it and about whether to do it at all. Former Secretary of State Colin Powell said over the weekend that he was not convinced a surge in troops would work, while Senate Democratic Leader Harry Reid said his party would support a limited, short-term jump in troop levels...
...November, Gen. John Abizaid, the CENTCOM boss, balked at the idea of a troop surge, telling the Senate Armed Services Committee he didn't need more troops to pacify Baghdad. Besides, he added, a surge presented two additional problems: it would discourage rather than encourage the Iraqis to take responsibility for their security. And it would not be sustainable. Abizaid said U.S. forces that have rotated out of Baghdad and back to the U.S. now lack the equipment to increase the "op-tempo," the Pentagon phrase for work rate...
DIED. Catherine Pollard, 88, the Boy Scouts of America's first female scoutmaster; in Seminole, Fla. Pollard, who had filled in as temporary leader of a troop in Milford, Conn., in the 1970s when no man volunteered, applied for the permanent job but was told women were not appropriate role models. Following a decade-long legal battle, the Scouts appointed her Milford's scoutmaster...
...government. Peace would obviously benefit the entire country in innumerable ways, but perhaps most important, it would make a U.S. military withdrawal politically possible. American leaders are paralyzed by indecision and political insecurity, and only peace in Iraq will let them off the hook and open the way for troop withdrawal. I cannot fully understand the rivalry and enmity among the people of Iraq. But the religious and ethnic factions need to learn to live together in peace, or they will live in fear and danger perpetually. BRIAN SCHILL Spring Branch, Texas...
...experience of the troops assigned to Mekanik, a mixed neighborhood that is home to both the powerful Shi'ite Mahdi Army and a Sunni militant group called the Omar Brigade, illustrates the U.S.'s dilemmas. The neighborhood had suffered months of killing between Sunnis and Shi'ites before U.S. forces found a solution: to make the murders stop, keep the cops, who were overwhelmingly Shi'ite, out. Lieut. Colonel Jeffrey Peterson, the U.S. troop commander for Mekanik, says, "Whenever we would talk to locals about [the violence], they always implicated the national police as starting it. I could never prove...