This symbiosis developed during the attritional years of the cold war.
Another new organisation called Conflicts Forum, founded by a former British intelligence officer, Alastair Crooke, attempts to serve as an interlocutor between militant Islamist groups, such as Hamas and Hizbullah, and the West.Some mediation work can be instantly glamorous and hugely fulfilling, as in Kenya, but most of it is attritional; often it is pretty boring.
Scholars had struck several awkward coinages to describe war-chastened Germany: it was a "tamed power" engaged in "attritional multilateralism".
Raking and schlepping cockles is attritional work, but lucrative (for their bosses, if not for the Chinese).
"We will not maintain quiet".Military assault, economic deprivation and political implosion from within and the slow, attritional destruction of Mr Arafat and his Palestinian Authority are, or so Palestinians insist, Mr Sharon's way of banishing the dream that Israel's 34-year occupation of the West Bank and Gaza will end.
The "closure", says just about every Palestinian, is the main reason why no ceasefire will hold.Military assault, economic deprivation and the attritional destruction of Mr Arafat and his Palestinian Authority are, or so Palestinians insist, Ariel Sharon's way of banishing the dream that Israel's 34-year occupation of the West Bank and Gaza will eventually end.
Mr Brown honed his droning, attritional approach to economic chat in a different job and in different times: during a boom, when voters were complacently content to be bored by their seemingly alchemic chancellor.
A no-nonsense campaign, which attacked AV for being a waste of public money, exploited Mr Clegg's unpopularity and strove to get core Tory voters to turn out delivered the first national victory than many Conservatives have known during their careers.It would also seem obvious that Labour will prosper from the attritional civil war going on within the coalition.
There was an implicit trust.Less than a year into his premiership, he is now, make no mistake, fighting something approaching an attritional civil war with what his advisers call "the machine".
Ministers were quickly bogged down in an attritional struggle with a "machine" they saw as hostile to many of their reforms.
These days, most play an attritional, baseline game that contributes to injuries and burnout.
