The United States should find a way short of war to defuse the threat posed by Iraq, former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev said Monday, and he urged U.S. leadership to drop the U.N. embargo against Saddam Hussein and incorporate Iraq into the global economy if inspections find no weapons of mass destruction.
In fact, Gorbachev warned, America risks alienating crucial allies if it tries to establish unrivaled military power instead of consulting with other nations in critical areas like the Middle East and the war against terrorism.
“I don’t think we can build a better world through military domination,” Gorbachev, speaking through an interpreter, told a group of editors at The Boston Globe on the first day of a two-week tour of the United States.
The 1990 Nobel peace laureate criticized what he saw as America’s failure to convince much of the world that it is more concerned about Hussein’s weapons than about lucrative oil contracts.

— Thanassis Cambanis,

The Boston Globe