In The Nation, Eric Alterman reminds us of Elliot Abrams’s lying on behalf of Salvadoran death squads in the Reagan years.
This was 20 years before the W. Bush administration’s “El Salvador Option” in Iraq, using the Badr Corps to hunt and kill Sunnis, which backfired, leading to Abrams’s “Redirection” policy to start tilting back toward al Qaeda.
Later he thankfully botched a coup in Venezuela.
Recent
"All this passionate praise of the supereminence of government action is but a poor disguise for the individual interventionist’s self-deification. The great god State is a great god only because it is expected to do exclusively what the individual advocate of...
"[I]t is evident ... that the man, who first made himself clothes and built himself a cabin, supplied himself with things which he did not much want, since he had lived without them till then; and why should he not have been able to support in his riper years, the...
"The alternative is not plan or no plan. The question is whose planning? Should each member of society plan for himself, or should a benevolent government alone plan for them all? The issue is not automatism versus conscious action; it is autonomous action of each...
