Word: commandeer
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...fear the consequences of a non-careerist life for the simple reason that it has given me securities that money, power, and fame cannot buy, attract, or command. Twenty-one years later, I am what I was not at graduation, mostly my own man. (No one is entirely his/her own person, for reasons of mortality...
...went to an outsider, Aircraft Service International of Miami, which has had to race to fathom the system in a few months. Then too the eagerness of Denver's leaders to retain control and ensure minority participation in all phases of construction led them to put city officials in command, overseeing hundreds of contracts, rather than hand off the duties to a general contractor, who might have provided tighter management. Notes an insider: "It was raw greed. Everyone wanted a piece of the contract monies. The city lost control at the outset, and the project was destined to run amuck...
Procedures have since been streamlined, but procedure is not the problem. The problem is that we could ever have contemplated letting the U.N. -- with no general staff, no military expertise, no command structure -- direct a NATO air campaign in the Balkans...
This lack of objectives is not the fault of the U.N. bureaucracy. Strategy is not its business. That must come from the Great Powers. But when the U.S. makes plain that it will pursue nothing that does not command the assent of "the allies" -- and the allies have conflicting objectives -- the result is guaranteed chaos...
...Bosnia is not a vital enough interest to warrant American intervention (as I believe), then we should stay out. The pretend intervention of putting ourselves under U.N. command leaves us with the worst of both worlds: devoid of initiative, yet committed to spasmodic engagement whenever the U.N. rouses itself to action...