Word: tokenism
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Days passed. The Joint Chiefs of Staff resisted sending the Independence, arguing that such a force, obviously no more than a token, would be no match for Saddam's giant war machine. Just before the invasion, with the Iraqi army now poised for assault, the White House overruled the Pentagon's concerns and ordered the warships toward the gulf. The decision probably came too late to impress Saddam...
...COMMITTEE'S desperate pursuit of secrecy isolates the committee's actions from public opinion as well as public oversight. Some senior faculty and administrators and powerful alumni have been interviewed at length by the search committee. A handful of students were briefly consulted. But aside from the committee's token requests for input, little has been done to ensure that the committee's choice will please many--or any--of the remaining thousands of Harvard students, staff or faculty. The uninformed are being kept in the dark about the biggest thing to happen to Harvard in 20 years...
...troops in a single engagement, and deliberately targets cities. The moral equivalent of his dumping oil into the Persian Gulf would be poisoning the Tigris and Euphrates or tampering with the dams at their headwaters. Yet both measures are out of the question. By the same token, if Saddam had nuclear weapons, he might very well use them; the U.S. does have nukes, but it will never use them...
...presence in the Middle East. The U.S. is more reliant on foreign oil today than at any time since the 1973 oil shock; imports have doubled since then, and last year accounted for more than half the trade deficit. Though last fall's budget deliberations did produce a token 5 cents-per-gal. increase in federal gasoline taxes, the possibility of further levies may have been scuttled when Republican pollster Robert Teeter found that Reagan Democrats were the idea's fiercest opponents...
...late last week, U.S. forces made up more than 60% of the coalition's 675,000 active personnel, among them deployments ranging from 36,000 crack Egyptian infantrymen down to some Afghan mujahedin guerrillas and 150 troops from Honduras. What the smaller land contingents -- as well as the token few warships sent by countries like Australia, Spain and Greece -- could accomplish that the alliance's core partners could not remained unanswered by the Pentagon. Even such a muscular U.S. ally as Italy, moreover, kept its participation to a minimum. Said Sergeant Robert Castellano, 26, a U.S. airman: "We look...