I leave notes to myself by one means or another all over the place. Some never resurface, some pop up but are no longer relevant, and some pop up that are still relevant months or even years later.
One such was a link to a Huffington Post article from mid-May about President Obama's supposed reset on Middle East policy: "Obama's Reset: Arab Spring or Same Old Thing?", Nick Turse, Huffington Post, 2011-05-17.
For all of Obama's talk about supporting the people in the efforts to free themselves of dictatorships and his condemnation against governments that use military force to thwart these efforts, his administration still supplies the tools of suppression - U.S.-made weaponry.
This is another instance of both parties being beholden to the corporatocracy of the U.S. instead of the people of the U.S. You can find a good definition of corporatocracy at Wikipedia.
Personally, I don't think we'll have any hope of world peace until the U.S. stops supporting dictatorships, cuts way back on its own military, and stops exporting so much military equipment. Are jobs here worth somebody dying in another country?
And I think the only way these will happen if a third party arises that really seeks to govern in the long-term interests of the American people instead of the short-term interests of a powerful few. Maybe such a party would take the advice of George Washington and Dwight Eisenhower in their farewell addresses, not as dogma, but as advice.
I'm sort of "ignorant of history" in that I have not read completely either of these. I did put versions of these addresses in my reading backlog file. My copy of Washington's address is from http://www.earlyamerica.com/earlyamerica/milestones/farewell/text.html and Eisenhower's is from http://www.americanrhetoric.com/speeches/dwightdeisenhowerfarewell.html. This latter site also includes the audio; you can find plenty of copies of the TV broadcast by a search for "eisenhower's farewell address".
