Nato said after both instances it had not seen evidence of a pullback, and last week the US government published satellite photos that it said showed Russian forces still massed near the Ukrainian border.
And anyway--this with a wink and a nod--the ostensible redeployment from 9% of the West Bank would be, in practice, a pullback from merely 2%.But for his critics in the Likud and the National Religious Party, even 2% is too much.
I don't think it's quite right to read this week's pullback as evidence of a new, nasty phase of the crisis, but it does seem to me that markets are nervous about growth prospects.
Yesterday we learned that while overall retail sales figures were down, the decline was almost entirely due to a pullback in spending on automobiles, thanks to the end of cash for clunkers.
The 3-month annualised rate of decline is now running at 7%.According to Lombard Street, in the initial stages of this pullback, consumers were substituting mortgage debt for credit card debt, a perfectly rational move.
On Monday, Amos Gilad, the Israeli major-general who has been negotiating with a Palestinian counterpart over the proposed pullback, said that any truce with the militants would only give Hamas time to regroup and plan more attacks.
Other Sunni politicians report a growing willingness among the non-jihadist groups, which make up the bulk of the insurgency, to consider a deal to wind down the fighting.Their main stated demands so far have been an immediate pullback of foreign troops from Iraqi cities and a timetable for full withdrawal.
A coalition defence minister conceded that, although about 30% of Colonel Qaddafi's forces had been destroyed, the new tactics were creating problems.Another idea that NATO is keen to dispel is that the American pullback has left it short of assets.
Part of this is the (hopefully temporary) shortage of greenbacks in Europe that is driving a pullback of dollar credit lines from Southeast Asia.
THE first priority for Europe after Russia's short August war with Georgia was to secure a ceasefire and a genuine pullback of Russian forces (see article).
But the good times ended in mid-2008 amid the credit crunch and the subsequent pullback in business spending.
