Word: swords
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Last year at this time the world worried about German unification, a U.S. appeals court overturned Oliver North's Iran-contra conviction, and Pete Rose was headed for jail. Saddam Hussein was ranting about Kuwait's excessive oil production, but few believed even he would choose the sword so soon after the end of Iraq's eight-year conflict with Iran. In fact, Saddam's bellicosity ("O God almighty, be witness that we have warned them") was barely noted. The big news from the Middle East was the possibility that Syria's Hafez Assad might finally be serious about negotiating...
That still leaves the anti-Saddam alliance in a quandary. Although U.N. Resolution 687 gives inspectors the authority to find and remove from Iraq all chemical, biological and nuclear material and equipment, enforcing the ban is a delicate job. Backed by Britain, Bush has been brandishing his sword largely to spook Saddam into cooperating with the U.N. inspection teams -- a strategy that has yielded only mixed results...
...buzz today about discontent, about social gloom and political drift, a crisis of faith in the future and a fading sense of national identity? An identity crisis -- in France? It sounds as unlikely as the notion of Cyrano de Bergerac fumbling his sword or groping for the mot juste. In his 1983 book The Europeans, the Italian journalist Luigi Barzini, a seasoned and mordant observer of the Continental scene, cites Edmond Rostand's fictional Cyrano as the quintessence of French character, at least as outsiders exaggerate it: the boastful, cocksure Gascon whose fellow provincials are defined in Rostand's play...
...curious and somewhat ironic commentary on high government that the designated roughnecks like Adams and Sununu often end up as victims of the terrible swift sword that they loved to wield so much. Adams by all accounts enjoyed laying about in righteous fervor in the name of national interest. And Sununu relished summoning the hapless Secretary of Education Lauro Cavazos to his office and giving him the heave-ho for the greater glory of Bush, who stayed away from the execution. Perhaps the power these men are given breeds in some ways the arrogance that leads them into trouble. There...
...power of the purse is Congress's most effective weapon, and the House last week wielded it like a double-bladed sword. Although the House approved George Bush's request for $291 billion in total military spending next year, its version of the 1992 defense-spending bill axed the President's pet B-2 Stealth bomber program and drastically cut funding for his Strategic Defense Initiative antiballistic-missile project...