http://tinyrevolution.com/mt/
Victory! Through! Ignorance! I didn't know this about Robert Gates, but I guess it could have been predicted: In 1980, Gates became the national intelligence officer for the Soviet Union, although he did not visit the country until nine years later. ...the intelligence estimates prepared under Casey and Gates about the Soviet threat -- now declassified -- were mostly unequivocal, though later they were shown to be largely wrong. Four years before the Soviet Union dissolved, for example, Gates warned in a memo that Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev was after power and not reform, leaving a "long competition and struggle ahead." Then there's Kenneth Pollack, now an expert on the "Middle East; Military and security affairs; Persian Gulf" for the Brookings Institution and formerly Director for Persian Gulf Affairs at the National Security Council (at the end of the Clinton administration) and before that an Iran-Iraq Military Analyst for Central Intelligence Agency. Here's his self-description, from his book The Persian Puzzle: For the last sixteen years, Iran has always been one of the countries I have worked on... I have never been to Iran... I also do not speak any Farsi (Persian). Here we see the mechanism through which power makes you stupid. On plantations, slaves knew an enormous amount about their owners and overseers. They had to, because their lives depended on it. Meanwhile, their owners knew close to nothing about them, because, who cares what slaves think? Likewise, less powerful countries simply can't afford to be this stupendously ignorant about the world. But here in the United States, who cares about what you could actually have seen with your own eyes in the Soviet Union? Who cares about the weird jibber-jabber the Iranians speak? It makes no nevermind to us here in the Big House. [Ah, but even inside the Big House, there are puppets and masters...] ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ SpamWall: Mail to this addy is deleted unread unless it contains the keyword "igve". _______________________________________________ Futurework mailing list [email protected] http://fes.uwaterloo.ca/mailman/listinfo/futurework
