Blair Anthony Seldon London: Free Press (Simon & Shuster), 2004, h/b, £20 What a tome! At 755 pages, with 40 chapters and 3000 plus footnotes, the book is neatly divided into chapters on either specific historical periods or significant individuals. The picture that emerges of Blair is striking in its variance from much of […]
[…] democratic governments’ such as Libya, or Burma for example. (19) In 1986, having launched from a British airfield his bomber raid on Colonel Gadhafi’s family, President Reagan described the Libyan despot as a ‘unique threat to free peoples’, a ‘rogue regime that advances its goals through the murder and maiming of innocent civilians’. […]
[…] South Africa. The restrained optimism of the essay’s conclusions, written in the first year of the Carter presidency, may sound a little odd after six years of Reagan. Support for drug-running criminals has moved from being the dark underside of U.S. foreign policy to (in the case of the Nicaraguan Contras) being at that […]
[…] is behind the firm’s success. Amongst Carlyle’s other advisors have been Bush’s former Secretary of State James Baker III; Arthur Levitt, former chairman of the SEC; former Reagan administration Secretary of Defence, Frank Carlucci; ex budget chief Richard Darman; and former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. John Shalikasvilli. Similar politerati pepper […]
[…] media were working hard to manufacture in the 1980s. The young anarcho-capitalists who took over the Fellowship of Conservative Students detested socialism and communism and shared the Reagan administration’s view of the Soviet Union as ‘the evil empire’. They thus became useful, minor foreign policy propaganda assets for the Reagan administration. Supporting any movement […]
[…] to persuade US Congressmen to lift the Section 907 ban on Azerbaijan (noted above); and (2) George Shultz (ex-President of Bechtel Group and ex-Secretary of State under Reagan), while on tour trying to persuade Azerbaijan to adopt a gas pipeline project, went so far as to refer to President Heydar Aliyev as Azerbaijan’s ‘George […]
[…] agencies do their best to bring only good news. (Which is usually inaccurate.) About the only interesting sections in this piece are those describing the way the Reagan administration has taken the logical step of trying to get the intelligence agencies to produce ‘proof’ of their various conspiracy theories about the world. The logic […]
[…] are palpably beginning to fail. The US has a constitution that still permits lurches of adjustment to changed conditions – we think of Jackson, Lincoln, Roosevelt, even Reagan – but the British system seems to offer us a different sort of lurch, from crisis to crisis with one step forward and two steps back. […]
[…] the covert war against Nicaragua involved a campaign of terror waged by CIA mercenaries that was nevertheless presented to the world as a liberation struggle. President Ronald Reagan celebrated ‘the contras’ as men in the same mould as the ‘Founding Fathers’ of the United States. This did not stop him trying to subvert the […]
[…] concludes that many (including Ben-Menashe) were lying or exaggerating in part. Despite this he concludes that the core of the story, that the in-coming Republican team round Reagan did a deal of some kind with the Iranians, is true. If the gun isn’t smoking, it is still warm. Parry paints a deeply depressing picture […]
