Colin Powell: “U.S. Forces: Challenges Ahead”

Glossary

• Baghdad the capital city of Iraq
• Balkans a mountainous geographical region of southeastern Europe and the site of numerous modern conflicts
• Cold War term used to denote the ideological struggle and threat of war between the Western powers, including the United States, and the Communist nations led by the Soviet Union
• demise of the Warsaw Pact end of the military alliance of Central and Eastern European Communist states in July 1991
• failed coup in the Soviet Union reference to the efforts of hard-liners in the government of the Soviet Union to seize power from President Mikhail Gorbachev in August 1991
• fall of the Berlin Wall reference to the opening of the wall separating West Berlin from Communist East Berlin in November 1989; symbol of the end of Communism
• hegemony dominance
• NATO North Atlantic Treaty Organization, a defense pact whose members at the time included the United States and the nations of Western Europe
• one in North Korea reference to Kim Il-sung, the president at the time of North Korea
• Pentagon U.S. Department of Defense headquarters in Virginia, often used as a figure of speech to refer to the nation’s defense establishment
• post–Cold War reverie the “dream” of world peace after the collapse of the Soviet Union and the apparent end of the cold war
• President Bush President George H. W. Bush, the forty-first U.S. president
• proconsulship governorship
• Saddam Hussein president of Iraq who ordered the invasion of Kuwait in 1990, leading to the First Gulf War
• Somalia a nation in East Africa torn by civil war in the 1990s
• surgical bombing limited bombing designed to destroy precisely defined targets
• tectonic plates reference to the earth’s landmasses, which move over time, suggesting the notion of the ground shifting