Word: persian
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During the Persian Gulf war, George Bush asked more of Israel than any other President ever had -- to do nothing while Iraqi Scuds screamed down on its cities. That is why it is riveting to watch Bush now in the role of Israel's angry disciplinarian. But just as it took a fierce anticommunist like Richard Nixon to open the door to China, it was Bush, the Commander in Chief of the armed forces that seven months ago routed Israel's enemy from Kuwait, who had to deliver the message no other President has ever delivered so publicly before: Israel...
Meanwhile, there was a war in the Persian Gulf, and Gorbachev had reason to fear that he might end up among the losers. During the last five months of 1990, largely under the influence of Foreign Minister Eduard Shevardnadze, the Soviet Union had sided with the U.S. -- and most of the rest of the world -- in demanding that Saddam Hussein withdraw his army of occupation from Kuwait. For reformers like Shevardnadze, Saddam was a grotesque example of the kind of Third World thug whom the Kremlin had too often supported over the decades. One of Yeltsin's closest deputies...
...officers, which wants to abolish compulsory service in favor of a volunteer, professional army, may get more attention. Middle-ranking officers, especially veterans of the Afghan war, are impatient for a switch from massive conventional forces to the high-tech systems that the U.S. fielded so ably in the Persian Gulf. In their view, a market economy and the dismantling of the defense bureaucracy offer the only hope for modernizing the military...
...course of the coup was surreal. Has television, which helped unravel the putsch, come to enforce its own brief attention span upon history? Recent great events -- the breakup of Eastern Europe, the Persian Gulf war, the failure of the coup -- seem to be enacting themselves in shorter and shorter time frames. Three days last week undid 10 centuries of civic dormancy. It is possible that the world is dividing between blood feuders and channel changers. The blood feuders, like zealots in Ireland or the Middle East, cannot forget revenge, even over many years; the impatient channel changers of the electronic...
Even cases of apparent fraud can fall into a gray area. Among the most serious charges Western countries have leveled at B.C.C.I. are accusations that it fraudulently concealed huge off-the-books loans to wealthy Middle East investors. But sources in the Persian Gulf note that Arab bankers have traditionally made large loans to the region's royal families and wealthy merchants without demanding the documentation Westerners would require...