Word: year
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...could yet be a factor. Palin has told friends she stands ready to help candidates in the 2010 elections, despite her negligible influence in the Nov. 3 off-year showings - newly elected GOP governors in New Jersey and Virginia largely rejected her help, and her chosen candidate in a special election for a New York congressional race lost a seat that had been reliably Republican since the Civil War. Nevertheless, she exerts a particular sway on her party's officeholders, goading them to avoid compromise with the President, making it more difficult for Obama to achieve his campaign pledge...
...with the Iraqis is tentative at best. The social services don't pan out. The troops continue to patrol in humvees, as before; they are blown up by IEDs, as before. The counterinsurgency manual gathers dust on the battalion commander's desk, then disappears. But somehow ... it works. A year later, the neighborhood is markedly quieter - but it's hard to say why. (See pictures of life returning to Iraq's streets...
...from Iraq. It is much poorer, vastly illiterate, governmentally incoherent and spectacularly corrupt - and its President, Hamid Karzai, shows no signs of the growth in office that Iraq's Nouri al-Maliki achieved (another mystery). In addition, the U.S. military has made some serious strategic mistakes in Afghanistan this year. "Why are the Marines in Helmand?" General McChrystal asked at one of his first strategy briefings, I'm told. Helmand province is where the opium crop and a lot of the bad guys are. According to counterinsurgency doctrine, the troops should have been sent to secure the Pashtun population center...
...Most of the attention the past few weeks has gone to numbers: How many more troops will the President send to Afghanistan? But there is a more important question: How long will he send them for? The military planners assume a five-to-10-year commitment. A more reasonable strategy would be to focus on the next year and see if there's any progress. Can the Afghan troops be trained? Will the Karzai government buckrake, or cooperate? Who are the Taliban, anyway? I'd send more trainers, and more troops to Kandahar, immediately, to give the effort its best...
...been an almost endless summer in Lebanon, with beach weather and relative political harmony continuing well into November. The only thing marring what could have been a perfect year for a country more accustomed to serving as a battleground in regional power struggles was the fact that Lebanon has had no government since parliamentary elections in June. That was until Monday, when the majority U.S.-backed political bloc and its rivals in the Syria- and Iran-backed minority coalition finally agreed on a new power-sharing Cabinet. But while the deal ends the three-year political crisis that brought...