Word: despots
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...orders they receive over their radios, unaware the commands are phony. Their troops are rendered ineffective as they scatter through the desert. U.S. planes, specially outfitted for psychological operations, then jam the enemy's TV broadcasts with propaganda messages that turn the populace against its ruler. When the despot boots up his PC, he finds that the millions of dollars he has hoarded in his Swiss bank account have been zeroed out. Zapped. All without firing a shot. A glow comes over Colonel Tanksley as he talks about this bloodless retribution. "We may be able to stop a war before...
Washington's hopes could still prove to be wishful thinking. Even as President Bill Clinton portrayed Saddam as a failing despot, "out of touch" with his closest aides, even as Hussein Kamel called for Saddam's overthrow into "the garbage heap of history," the brothers may not want to deal--or to be seen dealing--with the West. In any case, neither fits anyone's idea of a flower-power liberal. They rose by nepotism, survived by cunning and thrived by doing their leader's most morally questionable will. However quickly Saddam might replace them, though, Iraq's slow strangulation...
...example, the Rev. Jesse Jackson praised the Nigerian despot of the moment, General Ibrahim Babangida, as "one of the great leader-servants of the modern world in our time." This was the same Babangida who had ruthlessly suppressed political opponents, closed down independent newspapers and allowed his country to become a major transshipment point for heroin and other illegal drugs to which millions of U.S. citizens are addicted. Could Jackson's effusion have had anything to do with the help Babangida had given him over the years--for example, by providing a Nigerian Airways jet for a tour of southern...
...putting them into contemporary settings, the more incongruous the better (or worse). At Glimmerglass, British director Jonathan Miller and set designer John Conklin play it sumptuously straight. On a richly lighted stage dominated by an enormous sliding screen of gold, extravagantly costumed singers enact the intrigues of the despot's court with the stylized poise and dignity of figures in 18th century European Orientalist paintings...
Populism can display both good and bad qualities. Huey Long transformed the state of Louisiana, aiding thousands of poverty-stricken and poorly educated citizens. Yet at the same time, he nearly became an American despot...