Word: doubting
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Similarly, the Soviets are not withdrawing from Afghanistan because they have suddenly come to believe in "not imposing convictions on anyone" and "letting everyone choose for himself." Does anyone doubt that if the Afghan resistance had been overcome, Gorbachev would still be in Afghanistan, communizing? Gorbachev is withdrawing because he lost the war. Writes Afghan Expert Zalmay Khalilzad in the National Interest: "1986 was the turning point in the Afghan war." What happened? "The most crucial change in this period was the provision of U.S. Stinger ((antiaircraft)) missiles to the mujahedin." To put it bluntly, the Soviets are not leaving...
...efforts to impugn Dukakis' patriotism are part of a larger, time- tested Republican theme: to portray the Democrats as the inheritors of intellectual doubt and malaise, the party that is soft on defense, that perceives America as being on a long, slow decline. The Republicans, by contrast, have successfully cast themselves as the party of stand-tall patriotism and vigilant anti-Communism. As the hawkish Republican Congressman Newt Gingrich of Georgia put it, "If this election is between George Bush and someone who is more liberal than George McGovern, we win. If it's an election between two competent leaders...
Kaufman's argument no doubt appeals to Dukakis' belief in what the Founding Fathers stood for, as well as his sense of legal nicety. But Bush's aides believe they have struck a vein of patriotic gold with the issue. "It's a winner for us," says Chief of Staff Craig Fuller. "If Dukakis wants to debate the Pledge of Allegiance with us, we're happy to oblige." In the sound-bite brouhahas of a presidential campaign, the dispute over definitions of patriotism has hardly been edifying, and hardly the stuff of a significant national dialogue...
...military analysts point out that contingency plans are constantly subject to updating, and can be modified when compromised. In any case, many professionals doubt that NATO has enduring secrets. Former CIA Director Stansfield Turner said last week, "It's impossible to keep secrets when they're shared with 15 nations...
...memoir of the 1960s, Remembering America (Little, Brown; $19.95), Goodwin writes that Johnson was at times literally crazed and that his episodic madness helped propel the U.S. into "a needless tragedy of such immense consequences ((Viet Nam)) that, even now, the prospects for a restorative return remain in doubt." He brazenly diagnoses Johnson's large eccentricities as "incursions of paranoia," which led to leaps "into unreason" that "infected the entire presidential institution...