Word: two
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1990-1999
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...potential conflicts that are almost sure to attend the disintegration of communist rule in the East. But NATO is at best a stopgap until something more up-to-date and effective can be devised to take its place. The Western alliance was invented to maintain the standoff between two giant blocs. But the great ideological divide of the Iron Curtain is giving way to messier divisions among nation-states and nationalities within states. NATO is simply not constituted or equipped to deal with trouble between two highly uncomradely Warsaw Pact members, Hungary and Rumania, or between two feuding republics...
...quite. The group was on its way to plan the biggest U.S. military operation since Viet Nam: the invasion of Panama, launched two nights later. But perhaps she was not totally mistaken. If war preparations are scarcely usual in the Bush White House, they are not as stunningly out of character as they would have seemed only a few months ago. The Panama invasion marks the latest, but far from the first, stage in a monumental transformation of George Bush: from a President whose overriding imperative during his initial months in office was to avoid doing "something dumb...
...restore order in Panama City, where looters, some reportedly shouting, "Viva Bush!" ransacked stores and homes and where Noriega's misnamed Dignity Battalions, a paramilitary force, were putting up a street-to-street fight. Noriega's loyalists, apparently at his direction, staged hit-and-run attacks. On Friday, two days after American military commanders began declaring victory, they fired shells at the headquarters of the U.S. Southern Command. The Pentagon admitted that its forces had encountered stiffer resistance than expected, and Bush ordered an additional 2,000 troops to Panama as reinforcements. Meanwhile, Endara and his Vice Presidents were still...
...particular was held within a small circle; Joint Chiefs spokesman Colonel William Smullen asserts that "there were a handful, really a small number, of people in this entire building ((the Pentagon)) who knew this operation was going to happen." In retrospect, though, the invasion looks inevitable. The U.S. through two Administrations built Noriega into a menacing monster -- instead of what he was, the tin-pot dictator of a not very important country -- and put its credibility on the line in declaring that he had to go. But everything Washington tried -- propaganda, economic sanctions, attempts to foment a coup -- failed...
Noriega obligingly provided it. The dictator had his rubber-stamp People's Assembly name him "Maximum Leader" and declare that American provocations created a "state of war" between the two countries. That coincided with attacks on U.S. servicemen in Panama. There had previously been hundreds of . similar incidents and not all one-sided; in an altercation outside a laundry in Panama City, a U.S. officer, who was not supposed to be carrying a gun, shot and wounded a Panamanian. It is possible too that Washington took Noriega's declaration of "war" more seriously than it was intended. Nonetheless, the President...