Word: diplomatic
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Much in the style of Liberia's late President Samuel Doe, Siad Barre, a onetime policeman who seized power in a military coup in 1969, sealed his own fate by depending more and more on his kinsmen and overreacting to any challenge to his autocratic rule. Former U.S. diplomat Chester Crocker, a professor at Georgetown University, calls Siad Barre an "old-style, feudal, tribal chieftain." The country is ethnically homogeneous -- 98.8% are Somalis -- so there are no significant tribal hatreds. But its 8 million people are split into rival clans that have been battling one another for centuries...
Administration officials quickly scrambled to undo the effects of Waller's candor. Secretary of State James Baker claimed that the general's comments were intended to keep Saddam guessing. Countered a U.N. diplomat: "When an official states publicly that something is disinformation, that's when you know it is not." Meanwhile, White House press secretary Marlin Fitzwater told reporters that "what ((Waller)) really said is they might not be as ready as they would like...
...second-guessing, never any rationalization about what we might have done differently." Bush was "quite aware" of the cold war. He talked about it with his father Prescott Bush, who was then a U.S. Senator from Connecticut. Bush met Dwight Eisenhower and Secretary of State John Foster Dulles, the diplomat who riled the world by suggesting he had "to go to the brink" of war to keep peace. The President ponders a question on whether his current policy is a Dulles echo, then says, "Maybe so, maybe so. What I'm trying to do is convince Saddam Hussein that...
...concessions on his military capabilities: a drawdown of his troops, destruction of his chemical and biological weapons, inspection of his nuclear facilities to ensure that he is not building a bomb. Washington's position is that these measures could be enforced through a treaty. But, notes a senior British diplomat, "that is a hell of a difficult proposition." Such compromises would be extremely hard to win from Saddam through any means but a military defeat...
...Oddly, the fervently pro-business book is dedicated to Roman Samsel, the former Latin American correspondent for Trybuna Ludu, the Polish Communist Party newspaper. Samsel remains a key figure in Tyminski's campaign. "That kind of association ought to raise a lot of eyebrows in Poland," says a Western diplomat. At the least, it has fed unsubstantiated rumors that Tyminski had links to the former Communist government's secret service. No less disturbingly, the book devotes an entire chapter to Tyminski's call for Poland to arm itself with 100 medium- range nuclear missiles "so that we can work...