RugbyRebels

rowan wrote:I doubt very much GW Bush had much input into it, nor Reagan, of course, and probably not Obama either - other than fronting up and shaking hands for the newspaper photographers and all. Foreign policy is handled not by underlings but by people who are effectively 'superiors;' those with the real power - the military industrial complex, the big corporations, the CIA and so on. These people are evil as hell, but they're not idiots like most of the presidents have been.

So the President of the US is subordinate to the CIA? Ive heard other CTers refer to US presidents as front men and my response now remains as its always been - its rubbish.

Democracies are complex beasts and the real power is influence. All groups have some influence, some more than others. Presidents and Prime Ministers are human beings who (normally) listen to some form of advice. They get bad information and make mistakes, like the rest of us. Yet to suggest that they are under the control of a faceless group which is pulling the strings is CTism at its best/worst! The world is too complex to control, yet for some people there has to be someone to blame, so they assume someone is in ultimate control.

That's my view of it, it also appears to be the perspective of Chomsky, Pilger and others, and in fact I am beginning to see here what a massive problem it is for some posters to accept that others thinking differently to themselves.

Look, let's cut straight to the important stuff.........

Are we saying I'll get more medals?

Sure. I mean they still give out participation medals...

Anyone who thinks the likes of Reagan, GW or Obama were to the forefront of forming foreign policy obviously never heard anything these chumps had to say. Reagan thought Granada was a threat to America and bombed it just to be sure, GW didn't even know where Iraq was, and Obama wrote a book about how America needed to change and stop bombing other countries, then proceeded to bomb more countries even than GW did. It's no accident that American foreign policy never changes. Up to now it's been determined by precisely the same group of billionaires regardless who was sitting in the oval office. Trump's probably not going to be a whole lot different, and I'm no fan, but somehow he seems to have ideas of his own and it's going to be interesting to see where that leads.