Word: guerrillas
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...These images suggest nothing more than a burgeoning, long-term guerrilla war. And that has prompted some commentators in the Israeli media to invoke the dreaded "L" word - Lebanon. Israel's 18-year occupation of its northern neighbor is remembered in the Israeli collective psyche as its very own Vietnam-style quagmire, an unwinnable war that cost thousands of Israeli lives and ended in ignominious defeat. And for that same reason, over in the West Bank and Gaza, Lebanon carries considerable mythic significance, too. Only there, it's not op-ed columnists but young men with guns and bombs...
...politically paralyzed to take the actions against the Islamists and other militants that such progress would require. Unlike Arafat, many of those militants appear to have a clear strategy - the one perfected by Hezbollah in Lebanon, of inflicting a slow but steady stream of casualties on the Israelis through guerrilla warfare and terror strikes in the hope of turning Israeli public opinion against the occupation. And today that strategy, rather than Arafat's diplomacy, tends to hold sway on the Palestinian street...
...Arafat respond? He's let them loose. Having launched a guerrilla war last year after rejecting Israel's Camp David peace offer, he has unleashed every weapon in his arsenal: drive-by shootings, mortars, snipers and a green light to suicide bombers. There is a war going on. Why would he deprive himself of his most murderous weapons...
...There is certainly no shortage of scenarios that could see a resumption of hostilities. After all, the peace agreement on which the whole operation is based was signed not by the guerrillas, but by ethnic-Albanian political parties who'd been part of Macedonia's democratic political process, rather than waging war in the hills. NATO leaders coaxed and cajoled the Macedonian authorities into accepting a deal to substantially improve the political lot of their Albanian countrymen, a deal the alliance hopes will persuade the guerrillas to lay down their arms - or, more correctly, turn them over to NATO soldiers...
...Even for the non-suicidal insurgent, the allure of arms often trumps the bleak career alternatives of civilian life. From Sierra Leone and Angola to Mozambique and Somalia, many of Africa's Cold War-era guerrilla armies simply mutated into bandit gangs whose only purpose was to protect and extend their business interests...