Word: sovietizing
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Gates replied, "That's like going back and saying, 'If you'd known the mujahedin would morph into what they became, would you have supported them against the Soviet Union?' My view is, having done this for a long, long time, you never know. You make the best call you can with the information and judgment you have...
Gates' career has not been without controversy. He made his name as a Cold War hawk, an intelligence analyst who saw the Soviet Union as an implacable and evil adversary. During the Reagan Administration, he sided with hard-liners who got the Soviets wrong. He failed to recognize that Mikhail Gorbachev was a true reformer. He didn't believe that Soviet power was collapsing. "He said the Soviets would never leave Afghanistan. They did. He said [former Afghan President] Najibullah would never survive the Soviet departure. He was totally wrong. Najibullah survived three or four years," recalls Mort Abramowitz...
...Richard Armitage, an old friend and colleague. Four years later, while serving as Deputy National Security Adviser under President George H.W. Bush, Gates was nominated again to be DCI. What followed was one of the longest and most bitter confirmation hearings in Senate records. CIA co-workers from the Soviet desk excoriated his character, his motives, his honesty. They called him a toady who'd fire dissenters and slant intelligence just to please his then boss, Casey. The hearings, which went on for seven weeks before Gates was finally confirmed, were even more bruising than those in 1987. They gave...
...different story when pro-Western reformer Viktor Yushchenko swept into power five years ago. His victory, millions of Ukrainians believed, would tear the former Soviet republic from neighboring Russia's orbit and set it firmly on a course toward integration with the rest of Europe. But Yushchenko and his allies failed to make good on their promises of implementing democratic reforms, ending rampant corruption and creating a better quality of life. The stirring rhetoric of the revolution soon crashed against the sobering reality of Ukrainian politics, dominated since independence in 1991 by powerful business leaders and a deeply embedded system...
...difference between the two lies as much in their style as in substance. Yanukovych comes across as a Soviet-era apparatchik who wears crocodile-skin shoes while talking of protecting society's weakest and poorest. Tymoshenko appears a sharp-tongued social crusader famous for her big promises and designer clothes. Both are widely seen as opportunists and few Ukrainians believe they will bring the kind of changes millions long for. "Ukrainians are ready to be mobilized," says Dmytro Potekhin, a civil-society activist. "There's just no one to mobilize them...