Word: alienate
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Says Graham Fuller, a Middle East specialist with the CIA during the 1980s: "There was a genuine visceral fear of Islam in Washington as a force that was utterly alien to American thinking, and that really scared us. Senior people at the Pentagon and elsewhere were much more concerned about Islam than communism. It was an almost obsessive fear, leading to a mentality on our part that you should use any stick to beat a dog -- to stop the advance of Islamic fundamentalism." That stick was to be Iraq...
...enemies -- that of the alliance and that of Saddam Hussein -- have their own elaborate reality and logic. Each makes some sense on its own terms, each is performing its role in collision with the other before the eyes of the world. Each is persuasive to itself and alien to the other. One side's truth is the other's falsehood. A headline in Al-Rai, Jordan's largest-circulation daily, stated last week, WE ((Arabs)) FIGHT WITH THE SWORD OF GOD. THE U.S. FIGHTS WITH THE SWORD OF SATAN...
...coincidence that civil liberties come under assault during wartime. The kind of discipline that war necessitates is alien to democratic principles. The challenge is to keep reasonable efforts to win a war from mushrooming into repression. The Gulf War cannot become an excuse to prostitute American democracy. If the only way we can defeat Iraq is to mimic its form of government, the war is not worth fighting...
...upon magic. Now that information is transnational, daylight pours in. Certain shadowy and thunderous effects upon which charisma and old leadership depended have now become impossible. The New Paradigm is not haunted by the furies and ghosts of its parents. It looks upon the world with a disconcerting alien's eye. It is not a sentimentalist...
Edward Scissorhands Spooky-cute Johnny Depp and Winona Ryder -- they look like the figures on a Transylvanian wedding cake -- make ideally mismatched lovers in Tim Burton's witty fable, in which a sweet-souled alien comes to suburbia, makes a few friends and scurries back home. E.T., meet...