The Freedom Agenda
It's making me sick right now seeing the American conservative commentators try and claim that Obama's position on Egypt has been cynical and inneffective (which of course it has) in contrast to the "freedom agenda" of George W Bush, and his daddy and Ronny Regan before them (oh and Tony Blair gets credit too) - Charles Krauthammer raves on here. As if somehow the Egyptian revolution justifies the invasion of Iraq, because "freedom" was the premise behind both of these regime changes. Never mind that the Iraqi change resulted in the deaths of 100s of thousands of innocent civilians - some directly at the hands of the invaders, and many because they didn't have a fucking clue about internal politics of the country. Whereas the few 100s of Egyptians who died placed themselves willingly in front of the tanks, but were killed by cowardly police and their agents at the behest of the regime in the guise of a counter-protest.
Their blatant revisionism of "freedom loving" Regan, and 2 Bushes, and their records on "small government", and keeping the state out of the private affairs of Americans is also laughable. The footnote on the bottom of the Regan "legacy" always reads: he left the government with the biggest debt in history, and the largest military/espionage complex (not in terms of headcount in the military - but in terms of the resources it sucks from civil society) in history. And from that complex, the head of the CIA took over and started promoting his freedom agenda. Do the phrases "head of the hated secret police", "amassing vast private wealth", "Dynastic succession" ring a bell? Did any one of them (or Clinton for that matter - whichever one you wanna talk of) have any impact on the freedoms of anyone in the middle east (except for Israel).
Each successive government of the USA, despite rhetoric of private enterprise and civil society has managed to further pervert the way in the which the goverment spends the people's tax money. When I was working for DSTC in between 1994-2004 our little research centre in Australia received some significant cash from the American government. This was from 2 agencies: 1) DARPA, the largest research funding source in the US government for research... and I'm talking about human/computer interaction, and distributed systems - which had to justified to the Generals in terms of "steel on target"; and 2) "an unnamed agency" - you know, the one that was actually unnamed for it's first 40 years or so - "no such agency" (they now have tie-died T-shirts for sale with the NSA logo on them in the gift shop) Hi there you snooping Motherfuckers! (I doubt that any human in a bunker in Virginia will read this, but it's certainly going to processed by machine there - just like every phone call I make, every SMS I send, etc). Just my little window in the militarisation of the whole university system in the US and by contamination, her allies.
And don't get me started on Saudi Arabia.....
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Their blatant revisionism of "freedom loving" Regan, and 2 Bushes, and their records on "small government", and keeping the state out of the private affairs of Americans is also laughable. The footnote on the bottom of the Regan "legacy" always reads: he left the government with the biggest debt in history, and the largest military/espionage complex (not in terms of headcount in the military - but in terms of the resources it sucks from civil society) in history. And from that complex, the head of the CIA took over and started promoting his freedom agenda. Do the phrases "head of the hated secret police", "amassing vast private wealth", "Dynastic succession" ring a bell? Did any one of them (or Clinton for that matter - whichever one you wanna talk of) have any impact on the freedoms of anyone in the middle east (except for Israel).
Each successive government of the USA, despite rhetoric of private enterprise and civil society has managed to further pervert the way in the which the goverment spends the people's tax money. When I was working for DSTC in between 1994-2004 our little research centre in Australia received some significant cash from the American government. This was from 2 agencies: 1) DARPA, the largest research funding source in the US government for research... and I'm talking about human/computer interaction, and distributed systems - which had to justified to the Generals in terms of "steel on target"; and 2) "an unnamed agency" - you know, the one that was actually unnamed for it's first 40 years or so - "no such agency" (they now have tie-died T-shirts for sale with the NSA logo on them in the gift shop) Hi there you snooping Motherfuckers! (I doubt that any human in a bunker in Virginia will read this, but it's certainly going to processed by machine there - just like every phone call I make, every SMS I send, etc). Just my little window in the militarisation of the whole university system in the US and by contamination, her allies.
And don't get me started on Saudi Arabia.....
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posted by Keith Duddy at 9:38 am
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