Word: withdrawals
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...relative safety of the edge of town. A little girl cups her ears with her hands and wails each time firing breaks out. A 5-year-old boy gingerly waves a white flag. Insurgents duck and weave across housetops a few blocks away, trading fire as they withdraw back into their nest in the Sarai neighborhood...
...insurgents withdraw, only to resurface in a flanking movement from the west, trying to snipe at Green Berets looking to the east, sparking another long fire fight. When things quiet down, it isn't for long. Although the U.S. inflicts heavy punishment on al-Zarqawi's men, the Americans also absorb losses. During a raid by Delta Force operators of Task Force 145 in western Tall 'Afar, insurgents put up fierce resistance at a house believed to be sheltering one of the city's top al-Qaeda operatives. Eight Delta men are wounded, two so seriously that...
...less likely to pre-empt anything when youre keeping those resources bottled up in Washington, when youre shutting firehouses in New York so you can open oil refineries in Iraq, and when your best answer to poor intelligence is to torture prisoners at random, deport potentially valuable sources, and withdraw from the community of nations...
...problem is that the U.S. has become captive to the government it helped create. Baghdad knows Washington is not going to withdraw troops or decrease aid because the stakes of failure in Iraq are too high for the United States to abandon it prematurely. So there aren't many levers left to the Americans to influence the Iraqis. And without that influence, the Shi'ites and Kurds are free to engage in zero-sum politics, such as the constitutional process where there was little effort to accommodate Sunnis, even though America deemed Sunni inclusion crucial to undermining the insurgency...
Kudos to Sheehan for her bravery. The U.S. has just two choices in this war: pull out now and have Iraq immediately dissolve into civil war, or withdraw later on and have Iraq immediately dissolve into civil...