Word: benign
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...through Congress restrictive laws that would have been defeated in any climate but the ?war on terror? chill. ?Fahrenheit 9/11? shows some tragicomic effects of the Patriot Act: a man quizzed by the FBI for casually mentioning at his health club that he thought Bush was an ?asshole?; a benign peace group in Fresno, Cal., infiltrated by an undercover police agent...
...Wolfowitz, who serve Bush's two most powerful advisers, Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld. It was neoconservatives who provided the philosophical rationale for the President's gut response to the evildoers of Sept. 11: a grand crusade--yes, a crusade--to establish democracy in Iraq and then, via a benign tumbling of local dominoes, throughout the Middle East. Those who opposed the crusade opposed democracy. Those who opposed the President coddled terrorists (according to recent G.O.P. TV ads). They were not morally serious...
...empire laid down by European powers. The dream of the neo-imperialists was idealistic; they imagined that after U.S. soldiers had secured Iraq, the invisible infrastructure of the modern state-such as independent judges, honest civil servants and an efficient tax collection-would gradually take shape under a benign American tutelage until, one day, a beacon of democracy in the Middle East...
...Japan and Germany are often cited as the model of benign selfless occupation, but they may actually have been the exception. In both instances, their populations were under no illusions that their own leaders had started disastrous wars. Elsewhere, however, the occupier's presumption of virtue is seldom affirmed by the occupied. And Iraq has proved no different. However extensive the goodwill toward the Americans for getting rid of Saddam, it has steadily eroded over the past year. The prison abuse photographs outraged Iraqis, but may not have surprised them as much as the Americans. Nor are Iraqis impressed...
...empire laid down by European powers. The dream of the neo-imperialists was idealistic; they imagined that after U.S. soldiers had secured Iraq, the invisible infrastructure of the modern state?such as independent judges, honest civil servants and an efficient tax collection?would gradually take shape under a benign American tutelage until, one day, a beacon of democracy in the Middle East...