Word: gored
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...Gore has always approached foreign policy more with the passion of a crusader than with the calculation of a campaigner. From his first days in Congress, he devoted time and muscle to issues most lawmakers avoided as too complicated or politically expensive. The conviction that made him drag the spotlight onto Milosevic back then comes back to haunt him now, as the unfolding conflict inspires new Vietnam analogies every day, ones in which Gore plays Hubert Humphrey to Clinton's Lyndon Johnson. And yet rather than going AWOL, Gore has charged into the flames, touting himself as an "active participant...
Opponents of Clinton's Kosovo operation argue that this conflict has nothing to do with America's vital national interests. But Gore brings to his adviser-in-chief role a different definition of what those interests are and where our enemies lie. While America for a century has fielded armies to defend itself against hostile nations with ever more deadly weaponry, Gore believes the future threats will pose dangers that cannot be measured by throw weight--a poisoned environment, vanishing resources, refugees, disease, hunger, crime and terrorism...
...those are America's 21st century foes, Gore has been training for decades to take them on. He was worrying about global warming back in college, when it was still more a theory than a real threat. His interest in stabilizing post-apartheid South Africa has drawn him to the problems of goat farmers and ways of bringing clean water and solar power to remote villages. In 1994 he ordered the CIA to find out why countries fall apart. After feeding 2 million facts and figures from about 113 instances of national collapse into its computers, the intelligence agency came...
...Gore deserves credit for holding and pursuing his convictions, even if he can't always express what they are in a way people can understand. To critics whose ideas of national mission were shaped by the life-or-death struggle against communism, he makes the new age sound, well, New Age. "The Administration's humanitarian impulse is not well disciplined by a strong sense of national priorities," complains Harvey Sicherman, president of the Foreign Policy Research Institute, a conservative think tank. That could leave Americans confused as to why we get into conflicts and what constitutes success. Gore pushed hard...
Even his admirers can find inconsistencies between the moral imperatives he embraces in places like Kosovo and the means he is willing to employ to reach them. Gore was a leading advocate of the air war but one of the loudest voices against ground troops. Says an ardent if puzzled supporter, New Republic editor in chief Martin Peretz: "He puts himself into [Clinton's] policy even though I suspect his policy would have been rather different. He would have been earlier and stronger...