Forum

la morale de l histoire resterait toujours la meme..

washington declanche des guerres a la legere, malgre le manque de serieux de ses informations.

ce qui n a rien de reluisant.

bien sur comme vous le faites remarquer cela n est que fallacieux puisque la facon de faire venait directement de cheney rumsteack & co.

April 1, 2005
NEWS ANALYSIS
A Final Verdict on Prewar Intelligence Is Still Elusive
By TODD S. PURDUM
ASHINGTON, March 31 - It found no evidence that intelligence had been politically twisted to suit preconceptions about Iraq’s unconventional weapons programs, and made no formal judgments about how top policy makers had used that intelligence to justify war. Yet in its own way, the presidential commission on intelligence left little doubt that President Bush and his top aides had gotten what they wanted, not what they needed, when they were told that Saddam Hussein had a threatening arsenal of illicit weapons.

“It is hard to deny the conclusion that intelligence analysts worked in an environment that did not encourage skepticism about the conventional wisdom,” the commission said. But that understated indictment is about the extent of the commission’s effort to explain the responsibilities of the nation’s highest officials for one of the worst intelligence failures of modern times.

So the latest and presumably the last official review of such questions leaves unresolved what may be the biggest question of all: Who was accountable, and will they ever be held to account for letting what amounted to mere assumptions “harden into presumptions,” as Judge Laurence H. Silberman, chairman of the commission, put it.

A full accounting awaits the work of historians. But already some people have been judged, albeit it indirect ways, while others have been rewarded, even promoted. Some who foresaw potential disaster were punished or pushed aside, while the president and vice president were given new terms.

President Bush’s election-year order creating the commission (and a schedule that assured it would report well after the election) did not authorize it to investigate how policy makers had used the intelligence they received. In the end, the commission reserved by far its sharpest criticism for the agencies that provided the intelligence, blaming them over and over again in its 601-page unclassified report for “poor tradecraft and poor management.”

By comparison, the commission made a tantalizing but oblique reference to the president. It came in a passage criticizing the vaunted President’s Daily Brief, the super-secret intelligence document that Mr. Bush and his predecessors have received each morning, complaining that its “attention-grabbing headlines and drumbeat of repetition” left misleading impressions, and no room for shadings. “In ways both subtle and not so subtle, the daily reports seemed to be ‘selling’ intelligence,” the commission found, “in order to keep its customers, or at least the First Customer, interested.”

The clearest casualties of the Iraq intelligence failures - and the most direct targets of the commission - were the top leaders of the C.I.A., beginning with George J. Tenet, who resigned as director of central intelligence last summer in the face of rising criticism. President Bush later awarded him the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

After he left, Mr. Tenet’s top leadership team was effectively replaced by his designated successor, Porter J. Goss. Among those to go were Mr. Tenet’s deputy, John McLaughlin; James L. Pavitt and Stephen R. Kappes, top officials in the agency’s clandestine service; and Jami Miscik, the deputy director for intelligence.

The old C.I.A. leadership is portrayed by the commission as either troublingly unaware or disturbingly dismissive of deep concerns within the agency that the principal source of prewar intelligence about Mr. Hussein’s chemical and biological weapons programs was reported to have problems with drinking, reliability and truthfulness. At the same time, warnings unnamed analysts within the agency who questioned this information before the war were disregarded. Others who sought after the invasion to correct the informant’s lies were branded as troublemakers and pushed out of their jobs, the commission found.

President Bush himself has never publicly blamed anyone in his administration, and some officials intimately involved in the review and public discussion of prewar intelligence including Condoleezza Rice, now secretary of state, and Stephen J. Hadley, now national security adviser, have since been promoted. Others, like Paul D. Wolfowitz, the former deputy defense secretary and now president of the World Bank, have been publicly praised and rewarded.

Senator Bill Frist of Tennessee, the Republican majority leader, called the report “a forceful reminder of the need to transform America’s intelligence community to improve intelligence collection, analysis and dissemination, including its communication to policy makers.”

Former Senator Bob Graham, the Florida Democrat who was one of the few leaders in either party before the war to vigorously and publicly question the administration’s assertions about Iraq’s capacities, was considerably more critical.

“Thus far, this administration has been characterized by a stunning amount of indifference to what has occurred,” he said, adding: “This administration has held nobody accountable for anything, unless you count Tenet’s resignation. Of course, he then turned around and received the nation’s highest civilian award. They have been less than fully cooperative with the nonexecutive agencies which have attempted to find out what happened. It’s inexplicable to me, at a pure level of management, why the administration has not held people accountable.”

That is arguably so. But there may be another measure. With the exception of Mr. Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney and Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, there has now been considerable turnover in many of the administration officials most involved with prewar intelligence. At the Pentagon, Douglas J. Feith, the under secretary for policy who was deeply involved in intelligence matters, is leaving to return to private life soon.

While acknowledging the intelligence agencies’ past success maintaining the status quo, the commission’s co-chairman, former Senator Charles Robb, Democrat of Virginia, said the shifts in leadership that had already occurred, including Mr. Bush’s nomination of John D. Negroponte to be the first director of national intelligence, meant it would be “a whole lot easier to instigate change.”

Mr. Robb said that the commission had kept an open hot line for complaints, and “ran to ground” every report or rumor that came its way about potential political interference with intelligence-gathering and analysis, including reports that some C.I.A. analysts felt pressured by Mr. Cheney’s repeated personal visits to the agency. But he said it had found “absolutely no instance” of anyone reporting pressure to change a position.

For his part, Judge Silberman noted that the C.I.A. and other intelligence agencies had vigorously disputed any suggestion of a link between Mr. Hussein and Al Qaeda, but had not resisted the consensus opinion that Iraq had unconventional weapons. “They pushed that position,” he said of the intelligence agencies, but were “absolutely uniform and uniformly wrong.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/04/01/politics/01policy.html?th&emc=th

La grande erreur de vos analyses c’est que vous assimiler les opinions britanniques à l’ensemble de l’Europe: Il n’y a vraiment pas de distinctions sufisantes entre les deux côtés de l’Atlantique. J’espère que vous allez changer ce parti-pris afin que nous profitions de vos brillantes intuitions

Greece sails past EU target on deficit
By Graham Bowley International Herald Tribune Saturday, March 19, 2005
Berlusconi bristles at idea that Italy might miss mark, too Greece recorded a budget deficit of 6.1 percent of gross domestic product in 2004, official figures showed Friday, the biggest deficit in percentage terms of a European Union country since the introduction of the single currency in 1999.The Italian deficits in 2003 and 2004 could also be revised above the 3 percent limit of the battered EU Stability and Growth Pact, according to Eurostat, the EU statistics agency. The overshoots come before what is likely to be a fractious meeting of European governments in Brussels on Sunday, when finance ministers will try to agree to rework the pact amid widespread flouting of the rules by several EU countries. The doubt cast on Italy’s economy drew a blistering response from Silvio Berlusconi, Italy’s prime minister, who has been among the vanguard of EU nations seeking to relax the rules. Berlusconi said he would contest Eurostat’s figures. “We’re pretty tired of all this bureaucracy,” Berlusconi said in Rome, Reuters reported. “We are really determined to do battle over this because Europe’s job should not be to create difficulties for member states, but precisely the opposite.” The pact’s rules were put in place at the end of the last decade, largely at Germany’s insistence. They were meant to underpin public confidence in Europe’s fledgling currency by restricting countries’ freedom to run up large budget deficits. Germans were afraid that traditionally high-spending countries like Italy or Greece would undermine the stability they enjoyed under the Deutsche mark. But Germany, which has broken the 3 percent cap outlined in the pact for the past three years, is now leading a group of countries, including France, to weaken the rules by introducing a list of mitigating factors that would allow a country to escape punishment. Chancellor Gerhard Schröder of Germany said during a visit to Vienna on Friday that the new pact should put more emphasis on economic growth. “Stability is important, but growth is at least as important,” he said, according to Reuters. A meeting of finance ministers broke up in acrimony this month as they argued over the list of mitigating factors. Germany wants to be excused the massive payments it has made to support the former East Germany since reunification in 1990. France has wanted to leave out spending on defense and on research. Italy wants to exempt infrastructure. Britain, which does not participate in the euro currency, also wants to limit the powers of the European Commission to enforce sanctions on countries. But these moves have been resisted by fiscal disciplinarians like Austria and the Netherlands, as well as some of the new EU nations of Eastern Europe, which fear the relaxation of the rules could fatally undermine the euro before they can join. A decision on reform requires unanimity among all 25 EU nations. This week, Luxembourg, which holds the EU rotating presidency, floated a compromise to break the deadlock, in which countries could draw up their own list of special factors they could use to avoid sanctions if they broke the limit. This approach would represent a severe watering down of the pact compared with the strict rules put in place in the late 1990s. But the new figures could undermine the efforts of some EU countries to relax the rules, economists said. “These figures will add a little bit of weight to the argument that discipline is needed and should be applied with some severity,” Nicolas Sobczak, an economist at Goldman Sachs in Paris, told Bloomberg. Greece’s budget deficit was sharply higher than the government’s own estimate of 5.3 percent, although the figure could be revised still higher, Eurostat said. Questions remain about Greece’s spending on the Olympics, unpaid bills by hospitals and on the government’s accounting for payments to and from the EU central budget. The Greek government promised Friday to work with the European Union “in a framework of transparency” to fix the public accounts. “This is the heritage of fiscal disorder the Socialist governments left behind,” the Finance Ministry said in a statement in Athens. The ill will between countries could spill over into a meeting of EU heads of state and government in Brussels on Tuesday and Wednesday. EU leaders are hoping to focus on broader attempts to revitalize Europe’s slow-growing economies. They will try to restart the stalled Lisbon Agenda, an EU policy began five years ago that was aimed at making Europe the world’s most competitive economy by 2010. But one of the centerpieces of the new agenda, a directive to open up the EU market in services, has come under severe attack in the past few weeks. Countries like France and Germany have criticized it. They fear it will lead to social dumping. This would involve companies from low-cost countries in Eastern Europe undermining higher standards of social protection in western member states. This week Jaques Chirac, the French president, said the services directive was “unacceptable.” A demonstration against the services proposal, involving thousands of protesters, is expected in Brussels on Saturday. José Manuel Barroso, the European Commission president, called Friday for renewed political commitment to revive the EU reforms and boost the popularity of the Union. “What has been missing is a lack of sufficient political drive and commitment in many of our member states,” Barroso said in a speech in Poland. Carter Dougherty contributed reporting from Frankfurt.

http://www.iht.com/articles/2005/03/18/business/euro.html

Europe should defend its position just as vigorously as Bush’s vulcans

By Stewart Fleming

SHORTLY after President George W. Bush’s first election victory, during a high level seminar hosted by the European Commission, a top American diplomat grew tired of listening to British officials bleating about the new regime in Washington. Her advice: if you do not like the new unilateralism, you should stop whingeing and stand up for yourselves.

Bush’s choice of Paul Wolfowitz, one of the neo-Conservative ‘vulcans’ behind the president’s bellicose Middle East democratisation project, to head the World Bank has provoked yelps of pain from those of a puppy dog disposition. They should take the advice of that State Department official.

Bush’s visit to Brussels last month cast a patina of diplomatic conviviality over the EU-US relationship. Since his departure, those naïve enough to have been seduced into believing that the Bush administration’s unilateralist instincts have been diluted since the president’s second election success should have suffered a rude awakening. The Wolfowitz appointment, made without any meaningful consultations in advance, is just another sign that Bush may be softening his Texan vowels but not his ruthless Texan political instincts.

There have been two main lines of attack on the imminent Wolfowitz appointment. One, that he is not qualified for the job. The other, that the choice of leader of this important global financial institution should not continue to be in the gift of the American president.

The first criticism is easily dealt with. Some may not like the cut of Paul Wolfowitz’s political jib, but he is a highly intelligent, vastly experienced, government official, whose selection would not have caused much more than a ripple of surprise had it not been for the Iraq war.

As for Bush’s licence to select the new leader, here too the critics are missing the point. It is too soon to abandon the ‘gentlemen’s agreement’ that the US should have the right to choose the head of the World Bank and western European countries to select the managing director of the Bank’s sister institution, the International Monetary Fund (IMF).

The time is fast approaching when this convention will have passed its sell-by date. But Joseph Stiglitz, Nobel Prize winner in economics and a former World Bank chief economist, is mistaken to say it already has.

It is not just because the European Union, with its 30% stake, and the US, with around 16%, are still the main ‘shareholders’ in the World Bank and the IMF that he, and his supporters, are wrong.
It is American, European and Japanese taxpayers and investors who underpin the finances of the Bretton Woods ‘sisters’ in Washington.

When it comes to financial crises, it is the advanced industrial countries which have the resources, and the incentive, to organise rescues. It matters, too, that the leaders of the IMF and the World Bank are citizens of stable democracies. The over-hasty invitation to Russia to become a member of the Group of Seven (G7) in 1998 serves as a warning on this score. Already the managing director of the World Bank, Shengman Zhang, is Chinese. Do we really want its President to be the appointee of a potentially unstable or authoritarian regime?

The governance of the global economy is in flux. Chinese, Indian, South African and Brazilian officials are now invited to fringe meetings of the G7 finance ministers. Before too long, the G7 will be expanded to include them as full members.

The more interesting immediate issue, however, is why has Bush put so senior an official as Wolfowitz into the World Bank? What should not be overlooked is that this is an institution which lends $20 billion (e15bn) a year. And Washington is running short of the readies. The ability, through the World Bank, to influence both the direction and volume of this lending, and to shape the intellectual debate about economic development, is a prize not to be sniffed at by a country which is militarily stretched and whose ‘soft power’ tank is running on empty.

Bush’s realisation that he needs, belatedly, to pay more attention to the fragility of America’s finances is also manifested in the acrimonious breakdown in transatlantic discussions about the future financing of Boeing and Airbus civilian jets.

Because of Airbus, exports of Boeing civilian jets are not making the contribution they should to narrowing a US current account deficit which has just hit an annual rate of $700bn (e530bn), close to 7% of national output. In Washington, protectionist voices are rising too.

The deficit with China alone hit $162bn (e123bn) last year. But when, this week, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice raised the trade issue with her hosts in Beijing, she was not too politely reminded that it is partly the reverse flow into US Treasury bills of the funds from China’s trade surplus which is keeping the American economy afloat. It is not just Washington’s worries about European exports of military hardware to China, but also the strengthening of Europe’s trade position there as a result of any lifting of the EU arms embargo that is motivating Washington’s opposition to such a step.

A religious fundamentalist, Bush heads the most ideologically committed administration in the United States’ short history. The policy fine-tuning and the appointments Bush has made, including that of another ‘vulcan’, John Bolton, to be his UN ambassador, are a sign not of his conversion to the value of working with multilateral institutions but of the unavoidable necessity he faces of having to work more through them. Europe’s job is to stand up for its own interests just as vigorously.

·  Stewart Fleming is a former US editor of the Financial Times.

© Copyright 2005 The Economist Newspaper Limited. All rights reserved.

http://www.europeanvoice.com/current/article.asp?id=22494

Finance ministers keen to quiz Wolfowitz soon

THE EU is pressing the US administration to send Paul Wolfowitz, its nominee for president of the World Bank, to Brussels to answer questions about his likely policies.

At this week’s Brussels summit (22-23 March) EU finance ministers decided that they would like a meeting with Wolfowitz, attended by either finance or development ministers.

The aim would be to question Wolfowitz before the World Bank’s board meets next Wednesday (30 March) to appoint a successor to outgoing president James Wolfensohn.

A spokesman for the Council of Ministers said that he expected formal inquiries to be made with the US administration “in the next day or so” about possible dates.

At the very least, the Luxembourg Prime Minister Jean-Claude Juncker plans to question Wolfowitz, currently the US deputy defence secretary, in the next few days.

Luxembourg Economics Minister Jeannot Krecke said that there was “some concern about the way Mr Wolfowitz intends to handle the policy of the World Bank”.

German Chancellor Gerhard Schröder yesterday (23 March) said he believed that Europe would not block Wolfowitz’s nomination and UK Foreign Minister Jack Straw told BBC radio: “Paul Wolfowitz is a very distinguished and experienced international public servant and if his nomination is approved, we will happily work with him.”

The Belgian Finance Minister Didier Reynders said that Wolfowitz would be approved, adding “there is no other candidate”.

Since his nomination, Wolfowitz has sought to appease his critics, telling Le Monde that Africa would be his priority.

But, in the European Parliament, Daniel Cohn-Bendit, joint leader of the Greens/European Free Alliance group, UK Liberal MEP Andrew Duff, French centre-right deputy Alain Lamassoure and Austrian Socialist member Hannes Swoboda have signed a declaration urging member states not to accept US President George W. Bush’s nomination.

© Copyright 2005 The Economist Newspaper Limited. All rights reserved.

http://www.europeanvoice.com/current/article.asp?id=22486

March 29, 2005
Ex-Diplomats to Urge Rejection of Bolton as U.N. Ambassador
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
ASHINGTON, March 28 (AP) - A group of former American diplomats plan to send a letter to urge the Senate to reject John R. Bolton’s nomination to be the next United States ambassador to the United Nations.

“He is the wrong man for this position,” the group of 59 former diplomats say in the letter, addressed to Senator Richard G. Lugar, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Mr. Lugar, Republican of Indiana, has scheduled hearings for April 7 on Mr. Bolton’s nomination.

“We urge you to reject that nomination,” the former diplomats said in a letter dated Tuesday that was obtained by The Associated Press.

The former diplomats have served in both Democratic and Republican administrations, some for long terms and others briefly. They include Arthur A. Hartman, ambassador to France and the Soviet Union under Presidents Carter and Reagan and assistant secretary of state for European affairs under President Nixon.

Others who signed the letter include Princeton N. Lyman, ambassador to South Africa and Nigeria under President Reagan, the elder President Bush and President Clinton; Monteagle Stearns, ambassador to Greece and Ivory Coast in the Ford, Carter and Reagan administrations; and Spurgeon M. Keeny Jr., deputy director of the Arms Control Agency in the Carter administration.

Their criticism dwelt primarily on Mr. Bolton’s stand on issues as the State Department’s senior arms control official. They said he had an “exceptional record” of opposing American efforts to improve national security through arms control.

But the letter also chides Mr. Bolton for his “insistence that the U.N. is valuable only when it directly serves the United States.”

That view, the letter says, would not help him negotiate with other diplomats at the United Nations.

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/03/29/politics/29bolton.html?th&emc=th&oref=login

Empire virtuel dites-vous ? Je n’en suis pas si sûr.  L’idée qui voudrait qu’il s’agisse au fond d’une bataille visant à abolir l’Histoire – thèse adjacente de celle de Fukuyama – elle ne tient pas pour la bonne raison que l’Histoire n’existe pas, vu qu’elle est une sorte de boussole fabriquée par la raison humaine (je n’engage pas ce débat).
Que l’Amérique soit la puissante dominante, nous sommes d’accord, même si l’Amérique ne présente pas tous les attributs de la puissance au sens européen du terme, c’est-à-dire de « pax romana ».A cela une seule raison – parmi d’autres – l’Amérique est une île et comme l’Angleterre de jadis, ignore superbement le reste du monde (en terme culturel).
Je vous renvoie, par ailleurs, aux analyses des géopoliticiens allemands, à savoir l’opposition entre puissance maritime et puissance continentale, toujours d’actualité.
La raison pour laquelle, à mes yeux, l’Amérique est une puissance éphémère, c’est qu’elle n’a aucune unité raciale (tension culturelle permanente entre « noir », « chicanos » « jaune » « juif » et « blanc » avec demain la perte de l’anglais comme langue majoritaire). Sauf qu’aujourd’hui elle est « incontournable » et qu’elle est en train de changer la face du monde. Les dégâts seront-ils irréversibles ? à l’heure où l’Europe se délite et ne fait montre d’aucune « volonté de puissance » ?
Pour aller vite, et je pense qu’il y a là un axe de réflexion, ce qui me frappe c’est le changement d’échelle de la puissance sur le temps long (historique si vous voulez). Exception faite des empires greco-romains (ce qui fait dire à Valéry que les civilisations sont mortelles), nous assistons à un changement d’échelle sur lequel s’exerce la puissance dans le temps : on est passé du territoire à la nation, de la nation à l’empire (austro-hongrois, russe, etc.) pour aboutir aujourd’hui aux continents (Europe, Amérique, Asie). D’où ma question : et après ? Que peut-il donc bien y avoir au-dessus du continent ? Rien, l’espace ? Où le retour au Moyen Age mais style Mad Max !
Relire Nietzsche, je suis d’accord avec vous.

L’utilisation de l’euro impliquera la guerre. Voir Saddam.

J’essaye de suivre le lien que vous donnez sur la Force protection (ce vendredi matin, for the record) :

Star s & stripes

Le lien ne fonctionne pas, le site est introuvable. Introuvable du genre “le serveur n’existe pas”

Donc réflexe : aller sur anonymizer

tapez y le lien :
http://www.estripes.com/article.asp?section=104&article=27980

et cela marche ...

conclusion :
sachant que ma connexion provient du gros fournisseur historique français (Wa ... ) le site Stars & Stripes filtre les accès en fonction des adresses ip et jarte les connexions grand public françaises. Et ce n’est pas le seul (beaucoup des sites de l’US Army par exemple ... )

ou alors c’est le vendredi matin qui n’est pas propice

It’s worth noting that all of the anti-american commentary that you cite in the press reaction to Wolfie’s nomination to the World Bank, seems to be coming from Americans. It’s a bad sign for this administration when Yanks start doing ideology critique. Worse that I word, is the connection now being made between neo liberal Ideology and the kind of propaganda that was used to scam the world investiment community by Enron and whihc is now be deployed to scam the Amerian public over Social Security “reform.” Readers should take a look at Frank Rich’s latest column in the New York Times’ Arts section, “Enron: Patron Saint of Bush’s Fake News,” for biting criticism. Rich is yet another example of a NYT columnist who - like Paul Krugman - has suddenly evolved into an “accidential radical” and become a major thorn in the side of this mendacious and corrupt Administration.

Wolfowitz s’en va, la radioactivité reste.

Paolo

Vous trouverez sur le site

defendrelafrance.canalblog.com

des illustrations adéquates de constatations de cet article.

Berlusconi a du réagir par rapport à des prochaines élections régionales , reste à voir en septembre ce qu’il en adviendra ... effectivement .
Quant à la mort de Calipari , Sgrena est mise en avant mais si surtout les américains
avaient voulu éliminer
une possibilité d’entrer
en contact , traiter avec des opposants et hors de leur contrôle .. Clipari étant déjà intervenu à diverses reprises dans d’autres cas .

Bush est louche.

Et encore bravo !
    l’Omnivore Sobriquet

Bravo, comme d’habitude, de defensa a bien vise une guestion essentielle - quelle est nature du regime en place a Washington dominee par une faction radicale du camp “transformationaliste neo-conservateur, dont l’approche au monde exterieur est plus Bonapartiste que traditionaliste.
Interessant a noter donc, que le comite de redaction du National Interest, le forum de debat principal sur la politique exterieure Americaine des conservateurs divers, s’est casse en deux cette semaine et que la fraction neo-conne ont tous demissione en bloc pour protester contre la violence des critiques neo-realistes de la politque Bushevik permis dans le journal sour la ligne editioriale du Dimtry Simes,  redacteur en chef, etpresident du Nixon Center.
Le radicalisme des nationalistes du style du John Bolton (plus neo-confedere que neo-conservateur) provoque des fortes tensions au sein de la classe dirigeante americaine. C’est le moment pour s’interesser un plus aux clivages qui font des ravages au sein du Parti Republicain. Les contraints sur l’adventurisme Bushienne ne sont pas tous trouve a l’exterieur des Etats Unis.
John Mason