Word: trooped
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Given that the current U.S. force has been unable to curb sectarian killings, it's unreasonable to expect that a reduced U.S. troop presence would stop Sunnis and Shi'ites from killing one another. But even with a significantly smaller footprint, the U.S. would retain sufficient firepower on the ground and in the skies to guard against others trying to intervene. After a majority of U.S. troops depart, a military presence of some size will still be needed - not so much to referee a civil war, as U.S. forces are doing now, but to try to keep it from expanding...
...small counterterrorism force there. "No one is going to complain about going after an al-Qaeda target," says Anthony Zinni, former head of U.S. Central Command, who advocates a gradual disengagement from the sectarian conflict. Even so, the U.S. needs to be realistic about what 75,000 U.S. troops can achieve. "I want to blow up al-Qaeda wherever we can, but I don't think we're going to have any particular capacity to do that if we cut our troop strength in half and pull back into the desert," says Stephen Biddle of the Council on Foreign Relations...
...Czech Republic. Ivanov's threats only infuriated Poland and made Lithuania consider asking the U.S. for deploying its ABM on its soil as well. However, cruise and new MIRVED ICBM missiles, promised to be retargeted on Europe, are not the only ace up Putin's sleeve. Other measures, like troop buildups along southern borders in the Caucasus, new pressures on Ukraine to maintain the Russian Black Sea Fleet in the Crimea beyond the 2017 withdrawal deadline, and a refusal to leave Moldova are all in the offing among other measures...
...then an argument can be made that it is time to begin planning our departure. In fact, the departure is already being planned--in two places. There is the plan being devised by General Petraeus' staff in Iraq, which envisions a slow draw-down, paced by the Army's troop-rotation schedule; force levels would begin to ebb in March 2008 and reach pre-surge levels six months later. And there is more radical planning in the Pentagon, which would halve the current troop levels in a year. The growing friction between Petraeus and the Pentagon brass, with the generals...
...Whether or not Bush finds it necessary to "make another decision" probably won't be known until September. But ask senior White House staffers involved in Iraq planning what they imagine such a course shift would mean for troop levels, and you get a range just under 100,000. And what would these troops be doing? Bush himself laid it out today. "There's a lot of discussion about a scenario in which our troop posture would be to guard the territorial integrity of - of the country of Iraq, to embed and train, to help the Iraqi security forces deal...