Word: vaines
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...France still struggles to accept the regime of torture implemented by its soldiers in Algeria in a vain attempt to suppress the nationalist rebellion in the late 1950s. The French political class has been in denial for decades; they'd prefer to pretend it didn't happen. Not so the soldiers. The general in charge of counterinsurgency in Algiers, Paul Aussaresses, recently stirred the pot in a memoir in which he explained that torture was essential to achieving France's goals in Algeria. You sent me to suppress the rebellion, he argued. This was the only...
...Vain, Just Very, Very Beautiful
...bloody coup in 1962, and have been running the country with a truncheon ever since. Second, because of us. There has been no real roar against these human rights abusers, just the odd bark. Yet even single-party democracies check their mail. They're not just muscle; they're vain. Even juntas measure just how many boos and hisses they can get away with. Suu Kyi's peaceful bloody-mindedness is driven by courage, but her captors' bloody bloody-mindedness is driven by fear--fear of losing the business they are running for themselves...
...Until now, Americans have been told that those opposing the U.S. presence in Iraq are either foreign terrorists linked to al-Qaeda, or else Baathist desperadoes trying in vain to restore the old regime. But the Fallujah killings blasted a hole in the administration's standard explanations for ongoing violence in Iraq. The mob that danced around the charred bodies of the four Americans were very ordinary looking young Iraqis, making no effort to hide their identity despite the presence of numerous cameras - not exactly the behavior of Baathists or foreigners plotting furtively in the shadows. But then, Fallujah...
Understandably, the hard-earned exhausting victory was in a way tainted by the incident, but not fought in vain...