- U.S. efforts to dominate the world could end in disaster,
the Reuters news agency quoted former Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev
as saying on Monday.
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- A critic of the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003, Gorbachev
called for the rapid withdrawal of what he called occupation forces, warning:
"The longer they stay, the worse the situation will get.
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- "You cannot get anywhere ... by trying to dominate,"
he told a meeting marking the 20th anniversary of his 1985 Geneva summit
with U.S. President Ronald Reagan, a turning point in then frigid East-West
relations.
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- "That doesn't work with small countries nowadays,
and even less with big ones like Russia, Iran and -- heaven forbid -- China.
That way lies disaster," said Gorbachev, who lost his post as president
when the Soviet Union broke up in 1991.
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- "Trying to be a world gendarme today is an illusion.
That is not the way ahead, but a blind alley."
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- Insistence by the administration of U.S. President George
W. Bush that it had the right to use nuclear weaponry amounted to a renunciation
of the course he charted with Reagan and Bush's father in the second half
of the 1980s, he said.
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- If Washington pursued its efforts to put a defensive
weapons system in space, the 74-year-old Gorbachev told the meeting at
the United Nations European headquarters, "it will spark a new arms
race, with all the consequences....
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- "Surely it would be better if we worked together
to eliminate nuclear weapons entirely and to use the resources that are
freed to eradicate poverty and misery around the globe?" he asked
his audience, which included U.S. diplomats.
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- Gorbachev, who during much of his time in power from
1985 to 1991 also served as Communist Party chief, said he believed Russian
President Vladimir Putin was committed to a social democratic form of government.
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- Suggestions often heard in the outside world that Putin,
an agent of the KGB security police in Soviet days, was trying to turn
the clock back to authoritarian rule showed a lack of understanding of
what was happening in the country, he said.
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- Putin, he said, "inherited from (first Russian president
Boris) Yeltsin total chaos, in the economic, financial, political, foreign
policy and every other area of national life. He had to bring it all under
control.
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- "Is he succeeding? Perhaps not. Limiting democracy
is a mistake ... But the people are on Putin's side because he is trying
to solve social problems, to put an end to the poverty in which many live."
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