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Syria Buys Dell PCs Despite Sanctions
puddingebola writes with a New York Times article about how mundane PC equipment — not just more esoteric and eyebrow-raising network monitoring equipment from Blue Coat — makes its way to Syria: "Large amounts of computer equipment from Dell have been sold to the Syrian government through a Dubai-based distributor despite strict trade sanctions intended to ban the selling of technology to the regime, according to documents obtained by The New York Times. The disclosure of the computer sales is the latest example of how the Syrian government has managed to acquire technology, some of which is used to censor Internet activity and track opponents of the Syrian president, Bashar al-Assad."
I think the u.s. administration likes the muslim brotherhood taking over the middle east because they need a bad guy to chase to justify continued wars. There's a lot of muttering here in the u.s. that we should end all of these wars and pull out. But, you can't very well pull out if there's a new big bad villain to fill the old vacuum. It's a common C.I.A. tactic to prop up a known bad guy in place of an old regime, control him for awhile, soak up the hegemony this provides us until they turn on against the u.s. and then use the fact that they turned to instigate a new regime change and say "look he's turning on us for no reason and look at all his warcrimes, let's replace him" even though a lot of the crimes were committed in our name originally. It's kind of a repeating pattern with our foreign policy that is very predictable actually. Also, the cia needs funding that can't come from the tax payers because they draws criticism, questions, oversight, and political reputations/elections on the line. So they have to get their funding for blackops that the common man would not be cool with from illegal trade e.g. drugs, aka Afghanistan opium trade so that they can keep these operations off the books. It's also worth noting that our soldiers over in afghan *want* to burn down the poppy fields because they know how many lives they will ruin, but they're regularly given strict orders to look the other way by their superiors. Ultimately, this is all to defend democracy, capitalism and freedom of course, but a lot of terrible things are done to protect our existence that coincidentally proponents of our semi-utopia would never agree to if they knew the gritty details. It's very similar to how people eat meat and yet if they witnessed just how badly the animals were treated to get them that meat they might not enjoy their meal as much or at all. When I'd point things like this out when I was a child, my father would respond that I should not think about my food, just eat it.