Word: despotized
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...Union is poised to dispatch 2,500 troops to eastern Chad, where hundreds of thousands of Darfurian refugees and displaced Chadians live in fear. Now Europe's leaders must decide: Will those soldiers be a neutral protection force for civilians, or an army fighting to protect Chad's embattled despot...
...Coriolanus, who set out, as he wrote, with "truthfulness, courage, self-sacrifice, absence of self-seeking, brotherliness, heroism, optimism." Mbeki aspired to the same qualities, to be a "person who does good, and does it honestly," he tells Gevisser. But Coriolanus is a tragedy. The hero becomes a vainglorious despot. Mbeki is no Coriolanus, but as his paranoia and isolation reached new heights last year, Zwelinzima Vavi, the general secretary of the Congress of South African Trade Unions, warned the country may be "drifting toward dictatorship." For Mbeki, stopping Zuma, whom he had come to view as wholly unfit...
Elections and plebiscites are a sort of a moral Teflon for Chávez against charges from enemies like the U.S. that he's another Latin despot. (And he has developed some expertise at them: he has been elected three times and beat back a recall referendum in 2004.) But despite Chávez's claims that he's forging "a more genuine democracy" that finally enfranchises the nation's majority poor, Venezuela hardly looks poised to become a showcase for the separation of powers. The National Assembly and Supreme Court are Chávez's virtual rubber stamps; and, while free speech...
...other means. Handled correctly, it visibly treats its target as invisible. Thus did Laura Bush proceed to her seat in the U.N. General Assembly, steadying herself on the desk occupied by Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad but apparently ignoring him as he glanced her way. "The despondent despot," gloated the New York Post, "immediately lowered his head again" and sat back to look at his watch and listen as President Bush, in a speech, lambasted Iran's "brutal and repressive" regime. It was left to the Cuban Foreign Minister to snub Bush in turn by walking out on his speech...
...Despot Diplomacy Re "How to Deal with Dictators"[Aug. 6]: I was disappointed to read Peter Beinart's suggestion that bringing Benazir Bhutto back to power is the ideal way to solve mushrooming fundamentalism in Pakistan. It seems he has forgotten or is simply unaware of Bhutto's role in the rise of the Taliban in Afghanistan. Her government was the first to recognize the Taliban regime after it took control of Kabul in 1996 and hailed its leaders as agents of peace in the region. Bhutto's secularism is no more sincere than that of General Pervez Musharraf...