Word: strongmen
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...former top food and drug regulator for graft last week, the international scandal over tainted Chinese products speaks more to the central government's inability to monitor what's going on in factories nationwide than of simple malfeasance by a few renegade Beijing officials. In many places, regional strongmen exert more power than President Hu Jintao...
...over the continent often turned into full-scale regional wars when the protagonists cast themselves, or were cast - however improbably - as torch-bearers for Washington or Moscow. Such association would bring boundless diplomatic and financial support, not to mention boatloads of weapons and other military assistance, enabling local strongmen to wage self-serving wars for years on end. There's no Cold War any longer, of course, but in the case of Somalia, the "Global War on Terror" may be having a similar effect...
...Barney knows that extricating ourselves from Iraq will require cutting some ugly political deals with an assortment of rogues, who might be willing to help stabilize Iraq in return for a piece of the country's future: Sunni Baathist rebels and Shi'ite Islamists, Iranian spooks and Arab strongmen. That, at least, is one option currently under consideration by the Iraq Study Group, the panel headed by former Secretary of State James Baker, whom Rice prodded Bush to appoint in part to clip Rumsfeld's wings...
...back to the pre-9/11 paradigm of wholeheartedly supporting "friendly" dictators like Egypt's Hosni Mubarak and the Saudi royal family. If our support for the Shah of Iran in the 1970s or Yasser Arafat in the '90s has taught us anything, it should be that secular strongmen cannot keep the lid on forever. Either we push for change now or we risk a fundamentalist explosion later...
...standards of Arab strongmen, Hassan Nasrallah is a charmer. In televised appearances made from the undisclosed location where he shelters from Israeli bombs, the Hizballah leader appears more soothing than bellicose. There is none of Saddam Hussein's finger wagging or Yasser Arafat's eye-bulging lectures or Osama bin Laden's hectoring sneer. Instead, Nasrallah reads deliberately from notes, occasionally swallowing as if to catch his breath. Every so often, he looks into the camera and flashes a smile...