They should remember the lesson of the former shah of Iran, who spent lavishly on American weapons but lost his throne to domestic revolution.
That is the lesson of the former USSR, dominated by Russia Czechoslovakiaa, dominated by the Czechs; and Yugoslavia, dominated by the Serbs.
Yet isn't the lesson of the former F.B.I. agent Ali Soufan in his recent memoir, "The Black Banners," that precisely such methods obtained accurate information from prisoners, as opposed to the desperate fictions that captives offered to stay a torturer's hand?
Despite decades of heady economic growth, Mr. Xi told party insiders during a visit to Guangdong Province in December, China must still heed the "deeply profound" lessons of the former Soviet Union, where political rot, ideological heresy and military disloyalty brought down the governing party.
Raddatz says, "I take the lesson of a former intelligence officer who said, when I was a young man my dad took me deer hunting.
The lessons of one are the lessons of the other".
If Christian Pompa and Barry Leistner were to offer a lesson based on their conversion of the former factory at 144 West 18th Street in Chelsea into 18 condominium lofts, it would be that persistence pays off.
In this section, we compare the concepts of decentralization and localization and draw lessons from the former to inform implementation of the latter.
In baseball, people are still marveling at the year the Mets' knuckleball pitcher, R. A. Dickey, is having ("We wouldn't be nearly as amazed by this if he were a classical ace in the classical sense," Mike Vaccaro writes in The New York Post) and trying to figure out the lessons of the courtroom victory of the former pitcher Roger Clemens this week.
At the same time, Mr. Giuliani reduced subsidized housing placements from the shelters to a 10-year low, and let the pipeline of city-owned apartments dry up, convinced that the lesson of the Dinkins years was, as another former commissioner put it, "If you build it, they will come".
The country has seen 11 minority administrations in the past century, yet those with strong leaders have managed both to endure and to deliver big legislative changes.Other bits of the former empire offer lessons, too.
