Word: hindsighted
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...With hindsight, do you think the leaders of the democracy movement in China last year should have acted any differently...
...With hindsight it looks so obvious, so wickedly brilliant. There sat Kuwait, fat and ripe, bulging with enormous reserves of oil and cash, boasting an excellent port on the Persian Gulf -- and utterly incapable of defending itself against Iraq's proficient war machine. Saddam Hussein, hungry for money but greedier still for regional dominance, knew before the first of his soldiers crossed the border that it would be a walkover -- and it was. In 12 hours, Kuwait...
...essay from Budapest, we begin to see the true beauty of his accounts--he explains the logistics of the democratic movements in such a way that each step naturally proceeds from the last. Although no one claims to have predicted the changes in Eastern Europe, Ash's hindsight makes the refolutions seem completely logical, almost obvious. In an historical era that almost defies prediction, this is an unusually helpful perspective...
Almost half of this brief 150-page book is dedicated to Ash's experiences in Prague, where he witnessed the formation of the opposition movement firsthand and up-close. His precise analysis of the Czechoslovakian refolution won him acclaim within opposition circles and is equally brilliant in hindsight: "In Poland it took ten years," Ash explains. "In Hungary ten months, in East Germany ten weeks: perhaps in Czechoslovakia it will take ten days...
...nervous fiddling in Bonn was nothing compared with the havoc wrought in East Berlin. In hindsight it is clear that the fall of the Berlin Wall was due not to strategic planning, but to a sudden loss of nerve. A single ambiguous sentence uttered at a press conference, a mere slip of the tongue, was enough to start an avalanche. The unification of Germany was set off not by grand design but by a blunder...