Word: avoidance
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Average daily temperatures in Baghdad now are upward of 110 degrees, and U.S. troops who had hoped to be home in time for July 4th cookouts instead find themselves facing an enemy indistinguishable from the (often hostile) civilian population. And the enemy's strategy is to avoid ever presenting himself as a visible target, hoping to sap American morale and alienate the U.S. from the local population through hit and run attacks, and sabotage of reconstruction efforts...
...explain, for example, why Abbas repeatedly and strenuously emphasizes that he has no intention of going to war on Hamas - which is exactly what the Israelis and the Bush Administration are expecting him to do. Abbas, instead, is looking to draw those groups into a unity government and avoid confrontation. His reason is that those organizations have stronger support on the ground, right now, than the Palestinian Authority...
...standing among ordinary Palestinians rests on a combination of factors. Its foundations are in the mosques and among the clergy, and its extensive social welfare networks have provided such basic services as health and daycare where the PA has often failed. By staying out of the PA it has avoided the taint of corruption associated with the authority in the minds of ordinary Palestinians, and the terror strikes conducted by its armed wing in Israeli cities have answered the desire for vengeance among many ordinary Palestinians, particularly in the embittered and impoverished refugee camps of Gaza. The failure...
...hard for Americans to shake the collective memory of Vietnam when they're sending young men and women to kill and die in distant lands. And it's not only the quagmire-phobic antiwar types that can't avoid the Vietnam references: To raise their morale before entering Iraq in March, U.S. Marines in Kuwait were visited by R. Lee Ermey, the Vietnam vet who has become a USMC legend for his portrayal of a hard-as-nails gunnery sergeant in Stanley Kubrick's 'Nam flick "Full Metal Jacket." Ermey obliged by reciting some of his more memorable motivational lines...
...insurgents also appear to be constantly evolving their tactics to respond to new U.S. moves against them. On the one hand, they're more inclined to avoid concentrating their forces and making them an easier target, but on the other hand they're expanding the range of their own attacks. Sabotage attacks on oil pipelines reveal an acute awareness of Iraq's points of vulnerability, while Wednesday's firefights that killed six and wounded eight British troops mark an even more worrisome development. While attacks on U.S. forces had been mostly confined to the Sunni Baathist heartland, the Britons were...