Word: bereft
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...reckoning, the King should step down. His decision to back Saddam's fatal plunge into Kuwait was catastrophic. If the King looked at his situation clearly and not defensively, he would see that backing Saddam was sheer folly. Jordan, bereft of financial support, is depressed and dangerously unstable. Gross national product is down 50%. The population of 3 million -- 60% Palestinian -- teems with bitter, unemployed citizens and dispossessed gulf refugees. Anti-American chants in the streets of Amman will soon turn into cries for revenge. But abdication and exile are not the King's only means of escape...
...Bereft of satellites or even aerial reconnaissance, Saddam's commanders could not see what was going on behind allied lines. Thus Schwarzkopf was able to hoodwink Baghdad into concentrating its forces in the wrong places until the very end. Six of Iraq's 42 divisions were massed along the Kuwaiti coast, guarding against a seaborne invasion. U.S. Marines repeatedly practiced amphibious landings, as conspicuously as possible, and as zero hour approached, an armada of 31 ships swung into position to put them ashore near Kuwait City. The battleships Missouri and Wisconsin took turns, an hour at a time, firing their...
...most of the year, the movie industry keeps its social conscience under wraps. Then December rolls around, and like a Park Avenue pasha handing Christmas envelopes to the servants, Hollywood remembers the less fortunate. On this year's dole list are the American Indian (Dances with Wolves), the mentally bereft (Awakenings), the Nisei interned during World War II (Come See the Paradise) -- noble victims all, and all seen through the dewy eyes of a white male star (Kevin Costner or Robin Williams or Dennis Quaid) who elevates their plight by suffering along with them...
...really a battle for hearts and minds, and not merely an issue for police and courts and jails. So far, the antidrug offensive's main accomplishment has been to dissuade some experimenters and weekend users from digging themselves in deeper. The effort has not reached millions of people so bereft of hope that they are willing to risk everything they have, or will ever have, for a few moments of oblivion...
...Wall fell and communism collapsed throughout Europe, we Americans did not dance in the streets. What we did, according to the networks, was change the channel to avoid the news. Nonviolent revolutions do not uplift us, and the loss of mortal enemies only seems to leave us empty and bereft...