[PDF file]: The Fate of Abraham: Why the West is Wrong about Islam Peter Oborne London: Simon & Schuster, 2022, £25 (h/b) John Booth If you need a revival of spirit and energy this summer, Peter Oborne’s ambitious new book could help top up your political Vitamin D. For in its telling of some of the history […]
[PDF file]: […] 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 […]
[…] the 1980s via the Mena airstrip, when Bill Clinton was governor and controlled the state police. But the story goes further. Mena was the hub for the Reagan administration’s secret operation to supply Contra rebels in Nicaragua, which interested me because I had spent four years covering the Sandinista Revolution and the guerrilla insurgencies […]
[PDF file]: […] 1 2 It’s a formidable achievement’. (pp. 33-34) ‘A formidable achievement’! It would certainly have resulted in the impeachment of any previous president – except perhaps Ronald Reagan. Is Sopel’s response really the right one when a president clearly demonstrates a determination to stay in office by any means necessary? And when Trump turned […]
[…] Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney worked to kibosh detente with the Soviets in the 1970s, preparing the way for the neocon revival of the Soviet ‘menace’ under Ronald Reagan and his successors.52 The actions listed by Sachs have their immediate roots in the mid 1970s and ultimately – diEugenio would argue, I think – on […]
[…] Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney worked to kibosh detente with the Soviets in the 1970s, preparing the way for the neocon revival of the Soviet ‘menace’ under Ronald Reagan and his successors.15 The actions listed by Sachs have their immediate roots in the mid 1970s and ultimately – diEugenio would argue, I think – on […]
[PDF file]: […] democracy, the Shah. Jimmy Carter took the blame for that, and America launched itself into twenty years of living in a fairy tale world narrated by Ronald Reagan, followed by ten years of fear happily stoked by the very people who’d sold America the fairy-tale Kool-Aid in the first place. 1 Officially the United […]
[PDF file]: […] useless and powerless (or, for some on the libertarian right and the Marxist left, a source of evil and tyranny). This wasn’t how things looked before the Reagan and Thatcher-led counterrevolution. Yes, the world has changed since then. But if it came to a serious conflict between a major multinational and the UK government, […]
[PDF file]: […] as president in 1980 by arranging that the Iranian state not release the hostages taken from the American embassy until after the presidential election of 1980, which Reagan won. The relationship between America and Saudi Arabia – the real ‘special relationship’ – was cemented with the 1973 Saudi-American deal that the Saudis would only […]
[PDF file]: […] the New Deal and its successor programmes – Truman’s Fair Deal, Kennedy’s New Frontier and Johnson’s Great Society. This historic moment ended with the election of Ronald Reagan to the White House, with the backing of banks and corporations concerned about falling profitability, ‘big government’ and (what they saw as) high taxation and over […]
