The operation was supposed to be a low-cost triumph of what Clinton called "smart power," in which U.S. airstrikes, diplomacy, and Libyan rebel groups would win a swift victory without the need to involve U.S. ground troops.
Hawkish politicians were swift to crow triumph.
American art underwent convulsive changes in the late nineteen-fifties and early sixties, following the triumph and swift decline of Abstract Expressionism.
The Bush administration was then showing little patience for diplomacy or anything else that might delay what it envisioned as a swift and easy military triumph, with jubilant Iraqis cheering American troops, a model Middle Eastern democracy rising in Baghdad, reconstruction paid for by Iraqi oil revenue and no lengthy military occupation.
In 1906 the Simplified Spelling Board began functioning in N.Y., and there was every indication that its triumph would be swift & massive.
Older Germans relived their anguished memories of the post-war years and the euphoria of the unexpected triumph and the swift recovery of the West German nation in the 1950s and 1960s.
What happened in Texas this Tuesday served only to amplify alarm bells that have been sounding for months not just in the party of Obama, who can barely have imagined so swift a slide from favour since his triumph of 2008, but in the leather-armchair headquarters of the Republicans too.
But that may be true of the ill-fated Gallipoli campaign, which was intended by British politicians and generals to deliver a swift knockout blow to the Ottoman Empire, but instead ended in an Ottoman triumph and lengthened the conflict.
The swift passage of the Assembly bill, by a vote of 121 to 18, was considered a triumph for Mr. Bloomberg.
(As Ryan notes, the U.S. Postal Service's slogan — "Neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night stays these couriers from the swift completion of their appointed rounds" — is borrowed from Herodotus' praise of the Persian messenger service, a triumph of effective bureaucracy).
