Word: ruthless
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...however, the Administration is committed to Powell's plan, one that a senior European diplomat calls "ruthless prioritization." The short-term priority is to deal with the Taliban and its response to Bush's ultimatum. The longer-term goal is to build a strategy for concentrating on terrorism itself. "There's a sequence to follow," says the European source. "You've got to take them one at a time." In its initial phases, the military plan hence concentrates on Afghanistan. Last week the preparation for presenting the final options to Bush hit a brief snag. On Thursday, Shelton reviewed...
...Soviet invasion by passing billions of dollars of covert aid to mujahedin fighters. Once the Soviets pulled out, the mujahedin turned on one another, and the country descended into civil war. When the Taliban--a band of warrior students--swept into Kabul five years ago, it imposed a ruthless Islamic rule. It brought peace to the city, but the world was outraged by its practices, including public executions and a ban on work for women and schooling for girls. Music, TV and photographs were prohibited, and men were forced to grow beards...
...stockpiled by Iraq and other outlaw states. But Tucker points out that the leaders of such countries would probably be reluctant to let weapons banned by international treaty out of their direct control; if they were traced back it could lead to swift retaliation. "We know Saddam Hussein is ruthless," he says, "but generally he is not reckless...
...That ruthless streak will come in handy as Koizumi pursues his ambition to destroy old Japan. His ideological role model is Margaret Thatcher, the former British Prime Minister, whom he escorted around the Diet when she visited Japan back in the 1980s. Her mantras are his: privatize, cut government spending and stop mollycoddling loser companies. It's the opposite of his predecessors' prescription for Japan's woes. They spent more than $1 trillion over the past decade trying to rev up the moribund economy; Koizumi has promised to end this profligate spending, starting with a 10% cut in next year...
What's needed is a unified, unifying, Pearl Harbor sort of purple American fury--a ruthless indignation that doesn't leak away in a week or two, wandering off into Prozac-induced forgetfulness or into the next media sensation (O.J.... Elian... Chandra...) or into a corruptly thoughtful relativism (as has happened in the recent past, when, for example, you might hear someone say, "Terrible what he did, of course, but, you know, the Unabomber does have a point, doesn't he, about modern technology...