Summary: Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates bluntly told an audience of West Point cadets that “the odds of repeating another Afghanistan or Iraq — invading, pacifying, and administering a large third-world country — may be low” and that “any future defense secretary who advises the president to again send a big American land army into Asia or into the Middle East or Africa” should, in the words of General Douglas MacArthur, “have his head examined.” … One-year retrospective: One year ago today, on February 26, 2010, Aubrey Immelman reported that insurgents had struck in the heart of the Afghan capital with suicide attackers and a car bomb, targeting hotels used by foreigners and killing at least 16 people and wounding dozen. The four-hour assault began about 6:30 in the morning with a car bombing that leveled a residential hotel used by Indian doctors. A series of explosions and gunbattles left blood and debris in the rain-slicked streets and underscored the militants’ ability to strike in the heavily defended capital even as NATO marshals its forces against them in an assault on Marjah in the volatile south.

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Summary: The Iraqi capital of Baghdad is virtually locked down, with soldiers deployed across the city searching protesters trying to enter Liberation Square and closing off the plaza and side streets with razor wire. The heavy security presence reflects the concern of Iraqi officials that anti-government demonstrations in Iraq could gain traction as they did in Tunisia, Egypt, and Libya. … One-year retrospective: One year ago today, on February 24, 2010, Aubrey Immelman reported that more than eight years after the Taliban was toppled from power, the number of U.S. military fatalities in the Afghanistan war was nearing 1,000, a grim milestone in a resurgent conflict claiming the lives of an increasing number of troops who had survived previous tours of duty in Iraq.

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Summary: Iran’s president says he is certain the wave of unrest in the Middle East will spread to Europe and North America, bringing an end to governments he accused of oppressing and humiliating people. Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, whose own country resorted to violence to disperse an opposition rally earlier this month, also condemned Libya’s use of force against demonstrators, calling it “grotesque.” … One-year retrospective: One year ago today, on February 23, 2010, Aubrey Immelman provided his weekly report of U.S. military deaths in the Iraq and Afghanistan wars.

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Summary: Raymond Allen Davis, an American jailed in Pakistan for the fatal shooting of two armed men, was secretly working for the CIA and scouting a neighborhood when he was arrested — a disclosure likely to further frustrate U.S. government efforts to free the man and strain relations between two countries partnered in a fragile alliance in the war on terror. … One-year retrospective: One year ago today, on February 21, 2010, Aubrey Immelman reported that Nancy Carver of Rice, Minn., restored her shoreline on Little Rock Lake to native flowers and grasses and helped educate her neighbors about the importance of shoreline restoration for improving water quality.

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Summary: After anti-government unrest spread to the Libyan capital and protesters seized military bases and weapons, Moammar Gadhafi’s son, Seif al-Islam Gadhafi, went on state television to proclaim that his father remained in charge with the army’s backing and would “fight until the last man, the last woman, the last bullet.” … One-year retrospective: One year ago today, on February 20, 2010, Aubrey Immelman featured a rundown of current conspiracy theories and prevalent political paranoia, with special emphasis on conspiracy-theorist-in-chief Michele Bachmann.

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Summary: Taliban gunmen detonated explosives in front of a Kabul Bank branch and then stormed the building in the eastern Afghan city of Jalalabad, killing several people and injuring scores of others. … One-year retrospective: One year ago today, on February 19, 2010, Aubrey Immelman reported that Joseph Stack, a software engineer with a long-standing grudge against the Internal Revenue Service, crashed a small plane into an office building housing IRS employees in Austin, Texas.

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Summary: Weekly report of U.S. military deaths in the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, compiled from U.S. Department of Defense news releases and iCasualties.org. … One-year retrospective: One year ago today, on February 18, 2010, Aubrey Immelman reported that the Fargo-Moorhead Forum ran an informative editorial on Rep. Michele Bachmann, the face of an emerging brand of American protofascism spawned by the “perfect storm” of the attacks of 9/11, the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression, and the election of America’s first African-American president.

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Summary: Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-Minn.), who claims to support low taxes, has inexplicably come out in opposition to an Obama administration initiative to give expectant moms a tax break — reducing the tax liabilityof mothers who breastfeed their babies by allowing a tax deduction for the purchase of breast pumps. … One-year retrospective: One year ago today, on February 17, 2010, Aubrey Immelman reported that the Taliban’s top military commander had been captured in Karachi, Pakistan, in a secret joint operation by Pakistani and American intelligence forces. The commander, Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar, is an Afghan described by American officials as the most significant Taliban figure to be detained since the American-led war in Afghanistan started in late 2001. He ranked second in influence only to Mullah Muhammad Omar, the Taliban’s founder and a close associate of Osama bin Laden before the Sept. 11 attacks.

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Summary: About 2,000 demonstrators attacked government offices in the southern Iraqi province of
Wasit, ripping up pavement stones to hurl at a regional council headquarters in a protest over shoddy public services, leaving dozens of people injured. In the northern city of Sulaimaniyah, hundreds of demonstrators also thronged the streets demanding better services. … One-year retrospective: One year ago today, on February 16, 2010, Aubrey Immelman provided his weekly report of U.S. military deaths in the Iraq and Afghanistan wars.

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Summary: Rafid Ahmed Alwan al-Janabi, an Iraqi defector who fled Iraq in 1995 and went by the codename “Curveball,” has publicly admitted for the first time that he made up stories about mobile bioweapons trucks and secret factories to try to bring down Saddam Hussein’s regime. … One-year retrospective: One year ago today, on February 15, 2010, Aubrey Immelman reported that the incendiary rhetoric of demagogues like Glenn Beck or Michele Bachmann is powerful because it slips through the cracks in our acculturated human rationality, with its biological substrates in the fontal cortex, to hit a lower nerve in the subcortical brain regions of the limbic system, the seat of emotion.

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