Word: goodness
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...mosques on the East Coast and home to a charismatic Islamic cleric named Anwar al-Awlaki. Born in New Mexico in 1971 to Yemeni parents and educated at Colorado State University, al-Awlaki was often portrayed as a mainstream, moderate Muslim cleric who asserted that terrorists claiming to be good Muslims had "perverted their religion." But the perception of al-Awlaki shifted as intelligence officials began connecting the dots: they found that he had raised money for Hamas, had met with two of the 9/11 hijackers at his previous mosque in San Diego and had some association with other extremist...
...just finished a remarkable book called The Good Soldiers, by David Finkel. It is the best grunt's-eye view of the war in Iraq that I've read; certainly, it's the best written. But it also raises, implicitly, the mystery of our qualified success there. Finkel follows an Army battalion through the 2007 surge, as it attempts to secure a particularly nasty and neglected area of Baghdad. This was the first attempt to implement the Army's new counterinsurgency doctrine, and the troops have their doubts about the new tactics. Major Brent Cummings, the second-in-command, reads...
...decision about counterinsurgency doctrine, this time in Afghanistan. "They have a track record," a member of Obama's decision-making team recently said of Generals Petraeus and Stanley McChrystal. "I tend to give them the benefit of the doubt." True enough, but the mystery at the heart of The Good Soldiers remains: By what magic process did Iraq turn around, especially since the counterinsurgency tactics were so unevenly applied? Was it merely the doctrine - or did the ethnic cleansing of Baghdad neighborhoods and the sheer exhaustion after five years of astonishing fraternal brutality have something to do with...
...played badly. When it got down to two of us, I had $135 million in chips, but I think Darvin definitely outplayed me at first. There was a point where he had me down to $40 million in chips. Thankfully, I came back. I knew if I just made good decisions, I could turn things around...
...itself. But few barbs have caused as much annoyed bewilderment as the recent remarks by the French Minister of State for European Affairs, Pierre Lellouche, who called officials from the British Conservative Party "pathetic" and "autistic" and said they were guilty of having "castrated" Britain's influence in Europe. Good thing Lellouche is known as a staunch Anglophile, or he might have really gotten ornery...