Word: weak
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...Later that day, Thabit expressed frustration over the episode to Ferris, whose compound adjoins the police headquarters. The forces from Baghdad were difficult to control, Thabit said. They had weak officers and undisciplined rank-and-file men. And Thabit feared that the incident would only worsen the image problem already troubling the predominantly Shi'ite national police in Samarra, an overwhelmingly Sunni city where the outsiders are widely suspected of ties to the Mahdi Army of militant Shi'ite cleric Muqtada al Sadr...
...Israel now faces the sobering fact that Palestinians have split into two dangerous entities: the West Bank under Abbas' chaotic organization and weak leadership, and Gaza under Hamas - an organization pledged to destroy the Jewish state. So far, the Israelis have ruled out any offensive against Gaza's new rulers, but the military has sealed off the 30-mile-long strip's access by air, sea and land. Defense Minister Amir Peretz declared that Israel would not allow the violence in Gaza to spill over into attacks on southern Israel, and the Israelis have plenty of ways to strike back...
There's a lot to recommend this view. For starters, it gets jihadism right. Al-Qaeda-- style terrorism does stem more from state breakdown than state power. (Compare pre- and post-Saddam Iraq.) The weak-state concept also makes Democratic foreign policy broader than its Republican equivalent. In Bush-esque speeches this spring, Mitt Romney and Rudy Giuliani tried--unconvincingly--to cram virtually all of American foreign policy into the war on terror. Weak states, by contrast, offer Democrats a prism that isn't confined to the Islamic world...
...enough. Great-power competition isn't a historical artifact. The next President will spend countless hours managing China's rising influence in Asia, which threatens to marginalize the U.S. and our close ally, Japan. And he or she will have real problems with Russia, which although domestically weak throws its weight around overseas, jockeying for clout in the former Soviet Union and using its gas exports to bully Western Europe. Dealing with Moscow and Beijing will require strategic judgment, not humanitarian action. And if Democratic candidates avoid it, they risk confirming the stereotype that Democrats see foreign policy as social...
...India aren't part of the solution. The U.S. doesn't have the power or credibility to design and enforce rules for how other nations should handle public health, weapons proliferation, the environment or almost anything else without other big countries on board. The U.S.'s efforts to help weak states will largely depend on how well we cooperate with strong ones...