Free Republic

Putin's 'Creeping Coup'By WILLIAM SAFIREPublished: February 9, 2004 UNICH — This city is no longer the venue of appeasement. At an annual security conference here on the eve of NATO's seven-state expansion, Moscow's neo-imperialist defense minister threatened to back out of an agreement limiting the size of his armed forces on Russia's European front. Sergei Ivanov's bluff was immediately called by U.S. Senator John McCain. The Arizonan had accused Putin's regime of a "creeping coup" against democracy within Russia, as well as a campaign to intimidate and reassert control over states — from the Baltics to Belarus, Georgia and Ukraine...

Just when democracy was finally gaining the momentum it needed, President George W. Bush went and stuck his foot in his mouth once again. In his speech to the National Endowment for Democracy, the president spoke as eloquently as he could of the push for democracy in the Middle East and, in doing so, inadvertently undermined the efforts of any democratic hopeful in the region. http://www.dailytrojan.com/article.do?issue=/V150/N53&id=01-bush.53v.html

Q: With the apparent crumbling of the Saddam Hussein regime and the dramatic and seemingly jubilant scenes emanating from Baghdad and other cities throughout Iraq, have your views of the war changed?