Robert Evans. "Gorbachev : "U.S. bid to dominate invites disaster "

U.S. efforts to dominate the world could end in disaster, Mikhail Gorbachev, the Soviet Union's last leader who launched an era of cooperation with the United States that ended the Cold War, said on Monday.
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.
"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.
"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.
"Trying to be a world gendarme today is an illusion. That is not the way ahead, but a blind alley."
Insistence by the administration of President Bush that it had the right to use nuclear weaponry amounted to renunciation of the course he charted with Reagan and Bush's father in the second half of the 1980s, he said.
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....
"Surely it would be better if we worked together to eliminate nuclear weapons entirely and to use the resources that freed to eradicate poverty and misery around the globe?" he asked his audience, which included U.S. diplomats.
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 social democratic form of government.
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.
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.
"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."

Reuters, May 30, 2005