Word: tamely
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Saddam's "Republic of Fear"--as Iraqi exile Kanan Makiya dubbed Iraq in the title of his 1989 book--looks remarkably tame these days. You can fly into Baghdad's Saddam International Airport on one of the embargo-busting planes from Jordan or Syria or Lebanon that make regular runs--even if you are greeted by blood-red DOWN WITH AMERICA slogans daubed along the gangway in English. All the capital's buildings, bridges and roads damaged in the 1991 war and in follow-up American attacks in 1998 have been rebuilt. Fancy shops selling the goods of globalization line...
...critical moment will be when the Fed reluctantly gets back into the game. For now, inflation seems tame enough, and even an outbreak wouldn't be good news of sorts if it were tied to resurgent economic growth. But whenever energy prices are high - and despite taking a brief slide Monday as Iraq ended its month-long oil embargo, they still are - the worst kind of price pressures lurk. Add to that the weak dollar increasing domestic prices in the import-dependent U.S., and it's not too hard to imagine some version of that dreaded 70s economy - growth-less...
...first move Musharraf made to tame the ISI was dumping its chief, Ahmed. He and the President were close friends and fellow plotters in the 1999 coup that brought Musharraf to power. But the intelligence chief proved too radical for Musharraf's purposes. Former comrades of Ahmed's say he experienced a battlefield epiphany in the Himalayan peaks during a 1999 summer offensive against India and began to pursue his own Islamic-extremist agenda. At a Cabinet meeting, he once yelled at an official, "What do you know? You don't even go to prayers...
...those individuals may also be--as Arafat is--the authentic leaders of their people. That is why the Sri Lankan government is about to begin peace talks with the Tamil Tigers, a group whose long use of indiscriminate terror, child soldiers, suicide bombs and assassination makes Palestinian radicals look tame. In 1995 it was the pressing American national interest to end the war in Bosnia that threatened to sunder the Atlantic alliance. To reach that goal, Richard Holbrooke, the U.S. negotiator, enlisted the support of Slobodan Milosevic. The Serb leader is a monster who is currently standing trial...
...Placed next to the appalling ego circuses of Eastern gurus such as Sai Baba or Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh, the goings-on at Zen Center were pretty tame fare. But the real lure of Shoes Outside the Door: Desire, Devotion, and Excess at San Francisco Zen Center (Counterpoint; 385 pages) isn't the abuses and failings it chronicles, so much as the fact that they happened in the ever-elusive, and ever-alluring, world of Zen. Of all the Far Eastern spiritualities that Americans began importing as replacements for their own moribund faiths in the '60s and '70s, Zen has always...