Word: tilting
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...doubt some of the President-elect's differences with Bush have to be discounted as inflated campaign rhetoric. Israeli political scientist Yosef Goell, a columnist for the Jerusalem Post, regards the Democrat's promised tilt back to Israel as "total nonsense" and "all a smokescreen" designed to woo America's Jewish vote. On the whole, in fact, both major-party nominees saw eye to eye on the country's global role. Says Robert Hunter of Washington's Center for Strategic and International Studies: "One good thing about this election is that the two candidates are internationalist. The isolationists were defeated...
...realized the U.S. is not going to be an automatic safety net for every corrupt and incompetent regime in the region." Should Washington push too far, on the other hand, it might give militant Islamism, a movement distinctly untested in democratic virtues, entree to power. And a pronounced U.S. tilt back to Israel in the Middle East talks risks sending Syria and the Palestinians packing at a time when the 44-year-old quarrel is closer than ever to a semblance of comprehensive peace...
While the Administration's pro-Iraq tilt in 1989 and 1990 failed spectacularly in the end -- Bush himself admits it "was not successful" -- it had logic at the time. The original impetus was fear of the Ayatullah Khomeini's Iran. Even though Saddam had provoked the Iran-Iraq war in 1980, Washington began helping Iraq to stave off an Iranian victory. The Reagan Administration removed Baghdad from its list of terrorist countries, exchanged ambassadors, overlooked purchases of weapons from U.S. allies and secretly handed over intelligence about Iran's capabilities and intentions...
...Cover-Up? Bush critics dub the most controversial parts of prewar Iraq policy "Iraqgate": claims, still unproved, that the Administration has tried to hide the full extent of its tilt toward Iraq by interfering with the prosecution of the Atlanta branch of Italy's Banca Nazionale del Lavoro, which extended more than $4 billion in illegal loans that helped finance Baghdad's purchase of equipment with potential military applications. Officials at the Departments of State, Commerce, Defense and Energy who monitored "dual use" & sales, which amounted to $500 million between 1985 and 1990, knew they were helping Saddam's military...
...seeds of the affair were sown back in 1982 during the Iran-Iraq war, when President Reagan approved a "tilt" to Iraq as part of a campaign to keep either side from dominating the Persian Gulf region. That same year, the Reagan Administration scratched Iraq from its list of countries supporting terrorism and, in 1984, for the first time in 17 years, extended full diplomatic recognition to Saddam Hussein's Baghdad government. During the '80s, the U.S. guaranteed billions of dollars in commodity credits and loans to Iraq, while the CIA began secretly sharing intelligence information with Saddam...