Word: stalinistic
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...fact, Rumsfeld may have inadvertently hit on a significant analogy when, to dismiss "quagmire" fears, he compared Iraq with Eastern Europe in the wake of communism. Saddam's Iraq was certainly more akin to a Stalinist regime than any Arab autocracy. But the difference between it and post-Soviet Russia is that Iraq right now is wholly owned by the U.S. If the U.S. military had been occupying Russia in the wake of communism's collapse, the situation might have been quite different: Like post-Soviet Russians, Iraqis suddenly find themselves enjoying unprecedented freedom to speak their minds. But like...
...liberate the Arab world by brutally controlling its people: Iraq's ruling Ba'ath party was founded in 1947 to promote an Arab renaissance throughout the Middle East. Saddam turned Iraq's branch of that party into a front organization serving his Tikrit family mafia and his own Stalinist cult of personality. And that inevitably produced the bungling that led Iraq into the disastrous wars with Iran, Kuwait and the United States. Nasser lost a chunk of Egypt; Saddam lost all of Iraq...
After such knowledge, what forgiveness? Taubman's exploration of Khrushchev's complicity in Stalinist horror is probing, subtle. "Like many others," Taubman writes, "Khrushchev thought he was building a new socialist society, a glorious end that justified even the harshest means." So he "practiced deception and self-deception. He never fully owned up to his complicity." Touching a chillingly familiar chord, Taubman explains, "His complicity in great crimes ... was tied to nothing less than his own sense of self-worth, to his growing feeling of dignity, to the invigorating, intoxicating conviction that Stalin, a man he came almost to worship...
Over the course of the past 60 years, the American soldier has liberated Nazi death camps; thwarted Japanese attempts to build a racist, fascist empire in east Asia; saved millions of Koreans from the horrors of a Stalinist police state; fought valiantly to protect the freedom of the South Vietnamese; ended the torture, rape and murder of innocent Kuwaitis; and helped stop gruesome slaughter and ethnic cleansing in the Balkans. Moreover, for roughly 40 of those years the American soldier also protected Western Europe from Soviet aggression—a noble undertaking that ensured countless millions would never have...
...regime hadn't yet shattered, he admitted it was a good question. In part, he said, "Americans in particular have a hard time I think fully comprehending a totalitarian regime that terrorizes its own people and has established a system on control that recalls the Nazis and Stalinist Russia. It is hard for us to understand that a general like myself would be out in the field commanding an army because my family was being held hostage and threatened with death. All of it - human shields, execution squads - we have a very hard time understanding that. There are a number...