Holding Pattern

Lobster Issue 72 (Winter 2016) FREE

[PDF file]: […] the President would refer to him as ‘Bandar Bush’. Bandar has been a friend of the Bush family ever since working with George HW Bush during the Reagan administration, when Bandar ended up as the middle-man in paying the Nicaraguan contras. Prince Bandar has in fact been in and out of the shadows around […]

Suddenly in September?

Lobster Issue 82 (Winter 2021) FREE

[PDF file]: […] complicity? Does the closeness of the CIA to Pakistan, with its intelligence service’s ties to the Afghanistan ‘freedom fighters’ dating back at least to the Carter and Reagan years, point in a slightly different direction? Many Israel-supporting figures around Bush thought only a ‘catastrophic and catalysing event – like a new Pearl Harbour’ would […]

The Lost Peace by Richard Sakwa

Lobster Issue 88 (2024) FREE

[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 […]

Nixon’s Nuclear Specter by William Burr and Jeffrey P. Kimball

Lobster Issue 70 (Winter 2015) FREE

[PDF file]: […] the nuclear issue and issued no nuclear threats during his presidency. President Carter raised the possibility of a nuclear attack on Iran during the hostage crisis. President Reagan presided over a massive nuclear build-up which came close to accidental thermonuclear war during the misinterpreted Able Archer alert. President Clinton discussed using B61-11 tactical nuclear […]

Everybody Knows: Corruption in America by Sarah Chayes

Lobster Issue 81 (Summer 2021) FREE

[PDF file]: […] living through a new era of corruption, and this has become absolutely central to the working of the system. The conditions for this were created during the Reagan years when the unions were defeated, union power was rolled back, and there was the beginning of a massive shift in the balance of wealth and […]

The CIA, torture, history and American exceptionalism

Lobster Issue 69 (Summer 2015) FREE

[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 […]

The view from the bridge

Lobster Issue 66 (Winter 2013) FREE

[PDF file]: […] on Sunday of 1 September 2013 Yasmin Alibhai Brown wrote the following in a piece called ‘The special relationship is over. At long last!’ ‘When Thatcher and Reagan were locked in their long embrace, I 50 The Asia-Pacific Journal, Vol. 11, Issue 37, No. 1, September 14, 2013, available at . 51 22 Scott […]

The American deep state: Wall Street, big oil and the attack on U.S. democracy by Peter Dale Scott

Lobster Issue 69 (Summer 2015) FREE

[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 […]

Sailing Close To The Wind: Reminiscences by Dennis Skinner and Kevin Maguire

Lobster Issue 69 (Summer 2015) FREE

[PDF file]: […] history, the Stop the War march of 15 February 2003, presumably because it was against a Labour government. He ferociously condemns Thatcher for her relationship with Ronald Reagan, but is much more relaxed about Blair’s relationship with George W. Bush, a relationship that was sealed in a great deal of blood. The disastrous Iraq […]

The view from the bridge

Lobster Issue 71 (Summer 2016) FREE

[PDF file]: […] Konrad Adenauer, Archduke Otto von Habsburg, Franz Josef Strauss, Giulio Andreotti, Manuel Fraga Iribarne, Paul Vanden Boeynants, John Vorster, General Antonio de Spínola, Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan.’ I look at it pretty regularly and every once in a while see something really striking. Recently that was a purported interview with the former CIA […]

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