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April 22, 2005
At NATO Talks, Accord and Discord for U.S. and Russia
By STEVEN R. WEISMAN
VILNIUS, Lithuania, April 21 - NATO moved Thursday toward opening discussions with Ukraine about its becoming a member, while Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice met here with opposition leaders who want to oust the Russian-backed government in Belarus next door. At the same time, NATO reached an accord with Russia that foresees expanded military cooperation.

Taken together, the three steps reflected the contradictory state of American-Russian relations right now. The Russians have been very unhappy about the expansion of American influence in countries on their borders, and about American criticism of the state of democracy in Russia itself. Still, the Bush administration has tried to allay fears in Moscow that the United States wants to encircle Russia, and President Bush is planning to carry that message of reassurance when he visits Moscow next month.

Ms. Rice, who had previously declared that Belarus was the last dictatorship in Europe, warned bluntly on Thursday that the country should not conduct a “sham election” next year because its conduct would be “watched by the international community,” much as Ukraine’s election last year was watched and deemed fraudulent, helping to lead to a revolution.

The opposition leaders with whom Ms. Rice met said later that they would use “mass pressure for change” in the government of President Aleksandr G. Lukashenko in Belarus. But Ms. Rice cautioned that she was not suggesting any particular course of action for them.

The Russian foreign minister, Sergey Lavrov, was here in the capital of Lithuania, itself once a state in the Soviet Union but now a NATO member, to meet with the NATO foreign ministers.

He pronounced himself pleased with the Russia-NATO accord but added a note of displeasure over Ms. Rice’s meeting with Belarussian opposition leaders, saying Russia did not support “regime change” there.

Nikolai Cherginets, who heads the Commission on International Affairs and National Security in the upper house of the Belarussian Parliament, had a particularly sharp and personal reaction to Ms. Rice’s remarks, according to Interfax, an independent Russian news service. He called her description of Belarus as Europe’s last dictatorship “an appeal to overthrow the administration of a sovereign state, and this is a reminder of the cold war.”

Mr. Cherginets also said Ms. Rice should not be taken too seriously. “A woman euphoric with power is a dangerous creature,” he said, “but we should not overrate her.”

In Moscow earlier in the week, Ms. Rice heard complaints from officials and call-in listeners on a radio show that Russians fear that the United States is trying to surround Russia with allies and in some cases military forces. She told reporters that Russians seemed mired in a “19th-century” view of the world.

To counter such concerns, NATO moved Thursday to sign the new military agreement with Russia, which would allow an expansion of joint military exercises on Russian soil, possibly to prepare for future peacekeeping operations.

There have already been a few such joint exercises, focusing on how to deal with emergencies or humanitarian crises. American and NATO officials said the new accord would make it easier to transport foreign troops across Russia, for example to interdict narcotics and arms smuggling from places like Afghanistan.

Ms. Rice flew back to Washington on Thursday night after a three-day trip that included her first visit to Russia as secretary of state. Part of her task was to prepare for Mr. Bush’s visit to Moscow next month, alongside other world leaders, to commemorate the 60th anniversary of the end of World War II.

Lithuania plans to boycott the occasion, on the ground that the celebration is of a moment that marked the beginning of Russia’s grip on Eastern Europe and of the cold war.

NATO’s decision on Ukraine was set in motion after Viktor A. Yushchenko won the presidency last year in the wake of popular demonstrations that overturned a fraudulent election count that had favored the candidate preferred by Russia, Prime Minister Viktor F. Yanukovich. That uprising took place after one that installed a new pro-Western regime in Georgia, and it was followed this year by an uprising in Kyrgyzstan, another former Soviet state.

Mr. Yushchenko pressed the case for joining NATO in Washington in April, when he visited the White House and addressed Congress. Mr. Bush backed the request, but this week American officials said that admitting Ukraine would not be easy or rapid. Ukraine’s army used to be one of the largest in Europe, but it has shriveled recently.

“NATO is not just a club,” a senior State Department official said. “You’ve got to be able to contribute.” He said that before it could join NATO, Ukraine would need to show that civilian control over the military, as well as democracy, would last, and that its forces were effective and not “top heavy” with generals.

The NATO discussions encompassed other issues, including a decision by the alliance to be ready, if asked by the African Union, to transport additional forces to the Darfur region of Sudan, where tens of thousands have died in a civil war and many more have been driven from their homes.

But Jaap de Hoop Scheffer, the NATO secretary general, said any troop support would involve “planning and logistical support,” rather than “boots on the ground.”

The United States has tried without success to broker a Darfur peace agreement and get adequate relief to survivors of the victims of what it has called genocide. It has said it is committed to getting more outside forces there. “We all have a responsibility to do what we can to alleviate suffering in Darfur and to create conditions in which humanitarian aid can get in,” Ms. Rice said.

In addition, Mr. de Hoop Scheffer said there had been a discussion - purely hypothetical, he said - about the possibility of eventually sending NATO forces to other areas, for example as peacekeepers in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Ms. Rice pressed for a broader NATO role, or at least a discussion of such a role. “We intend to use NATO more and more effectively as a trans-Atlantic security forum,” she said. But the French foreign minister, Michel Barnier, warned against turning NATO into “the world’s policeman” and taking on too many tasks outside Europe.

C. J. Chivers contributed reporting from Moscow for this article.

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/04/22/international/europe/22diplo.html?th&emc=th&oref=login

Il Manifesto a titré le lendemain de son élection:

IL PASTORE TEDESCO.

Décidément, les journalistes de “de defensa” n’ont pas fini de m’étonner.
Quelle belle mise au point !!!

The missing energy strategy

The New York Times Wednesday, April 20, 2005

The U.S. House of Representatives is moving quickly and with sad predictability toward approval of yet another energy bill heavily weighted in favor of the oil, gas and coal industries. In due course the Senate may give Americans something better. But unless President George W. Bush rapidly elevates the discussion, any bill that emerges from Congress is almost certain to fall short of the creative strategies needed to confront the two great energy-related issues of the age: America’s increasing dependency on imported oil, and global warming, which is caused chiefly by the very fuels the bill so generously subsidizes.

What’s maddening about this is that there is no shortage of ideas about what to do. Step outside the White House and Congress, and one hears a chorus of voices begging for something far more robust and forward-looking than the trivialities of this energy bill. It is a strikingly bipartisan chorus, too, embracing environmentalists, foreign policy hawks and other unlikely allies. Last month, for instance, a group of military and intelligence experts who cut their teeth on the cold war - among them Robert McFarland, James Woolsey and Frank Gaffney Jr. - implored Bush as a matter of national security to undertake a crash program to reduce the consumption of oil in the United States.

The consensus on the need for a more stable energy future is matched by an emerging consensus on how to get there. In the last two years, there have been three major reports remarkable for their clarity and convergence, from the Energy Future Coalition, a group of officials from the Clinton and the first Bush administrations; the Rocky Mountain Institute, which concerns itself with energy efficiency; and, most recently, the National Commission On Energy Policy, a group of heavyweights from academia, business and labor.

Homage is paid to stronger fuel economy standards, which Congress has steadfastly resisted. But all three reports also call for major tax subsidies and loan guarantees to help the U.S. automobile industry develop a new generation of vehicles, as well as an aggressive bio-fuels program to develop substitutes for gasoline.

The main virtue of moving to more efficient vehicles is that they would reduce oil imports (transportation accounts for two-thirds of the oil that Americans consume). But they would also reduce emissions of carbon dioxide, the main cause of global warming. Here is another issue where the rest of the world seems to be rushing past Bush. In January, Europe imposed emission quotas on thousands of power plants and other industrial sites in an effort to meet its obligations under the Kyoto Protocol, the international agreement repudiated by Bush in 2001. And last week, Canada unveiled its own strategy for meeting its commitments by cutting emissions from power plants and automobiles.

There is also a growing number of American global warming initiatives at the state level. They include California’s aggressive plan to limit carbon dioxide emissions from automobiles, and efforts by Governor George Pataki of New York to organize a consortium of Northeastern states to begin reducing power-plant emissions.

Even the coal-fired utilities, the companies Bush sought to protect by rejecting the emissions targets specified in the Kyoto Protocol, are getting religion. The most recent convert is Cinergy, a powerful Midwestern utility that now seems willing to accept mandatory caps on emissions and to put money into advanced “clean coal” technologies.

Yet no company, and no state, can go it alone. Changing the way the United States produces and uses energy will require a determined national effort organized by the president, but Bush, so far, has been content to remain at the rear of a parade he ought to be leading. It will also require a far more adventurous approach from a Congress whose solicitude for special interests has greatly exceeded its concern for the national interest.

http://www.iht.com/bin/print_ipub.php?file=/articles/2005/04/19/opinion/edenergy.html

Toutes les sociétés fachistes, de l’histoire à la science-fiction, ne marchent qu’en faveur de règles très strictes. Et à la capacité des hommes faibles à s’y conformer, non par probité citoyenne, mais par un abrutissement général à la pinocchio et besoin de soumission pour se laver de la culpabilité permanente qu’il est d’être un Homme digne dans ce monde où tous les jours on nous apprends à fermer les yeux sur l’injustice.

Ce genre de situations est un très bon exercice pour les scribes qui se font l’essai de construire la Synarchie mondiale qui est à l’oeuvre.

C’est Clemons et non Clemond… Tout le monde aura corrigé.

Clemons est-il téléguidé? et par qui?

Désolé d’être simpliste, mais si le deal est “win-win”, pourquoi les chinois ne négocieraient-ils pas davantage?

Alter-question: Se pourrait-il que les américains maintiennent l’embargo Chinois uniquement parce qu’ils souhaitent que l’Europe ne bénéficie pas de ce marché pendant qu’ils exercent leur containment? En quelque sorte, l’embargo à l’import chinois serait-il un embargo à l’export européen?

Un préalable: remplacer “technologies stealth” par “technologies issues du retro-engineering” soit tout simplement “technologies Ovni”.

Ensuite, si les américains ne veulent pas que l’Europe vendent des armes à la Chine sous prétexte de JSF, c’est que quelque part, nous devons bien détenir des armes stratégiques qui intéresseraient les Chinois. La question est: lesquelles?

Si quelqu’un a de l’eau a apporter au moulin, je suis preneur.

Je ne sais pas qui est cette personne avec qui vous avez parlé, laquelle avait entendu un scientifique américain à la retraite croyant savoir que les Etats-Unis auraient donné la bombe à la France pour qu’elle puisse la refiler à Israël.

Je note que cette allégation va à l’encontre de toutes les informations fournies par ailleurs, de sources quant à elles vérifiées. Elle ne correspond pas non plus à l’attitude réelle des Etats-Unis vis-à-vis de la bombe israélienne : ils y étaient opposés, et Français et Israéliens durent mener une opération de couverture afin de dissimuler la véritable nature de l’ “usine de pantalons Ben Gourion”, que la France a construit pour le compte d’Israël et qui est connue aujourd’hui sous le nom de centre nucléaire de Dimona.

Notons également que la Grande-Bretagne, qui apporta une contribution importante à la naissance même de la bombe lors du projet Manhattan, a pourtant perdu une grande part de son indépendance en la matière du simple fait qu’elle s’est trop appuyée sur l’expertise et l’aide venue d’outre-Atlantique. C’est-à-dire qu’un pays qui au départ en savait davantage que la France s’est retrouvé dépendant, tandis que la France a la maîtrise de l’arme nucléaire, au meilleur niveau et en toute indépendance. Comment se pourrait-il que la Grande-Bretagne ait été “traitée” beaucoup plus mal que la France ... si la France elle aussi avait accepté la dépendance ?

Bref, je crois que le genre de rumeur qui vous a été rapporté n’est que cela ...

Cette politique est clairement expliquée dans “An End to Evil”, le bouquin de Frum et Perle qui explique, à l’instar de “The axis of Evil”, la politique de la maison blanche pour les 4 années à venir

J’ai l’impression que ça arrangerait tout le monde en GB que les français votent non. Ca les éviteraient eux-même de se confronter à la crise populaire.

En effet que la GB soit dedans ou dehors, ça ne changera rien à l’Europe. Ce qui pourrait changer, ce serait que la GB choisisse une bonne fois pour toute l’Europe dans son coeur et son âme. Et ça, ce serait finalement le plus grand risque d’un référendum en GB. Que le peuple signale à ses dirigeants qu’il n’est pas aussi eurosceptique que leurs interêts atlantistes le souhaitent!

J’ai discuté avec une personne avant-hier, qui m’a appris que le nucléaire français militaire, déjà sous de Gaule, est né grâce à un partenariat avec les USA. Il tenait l’information d’un scientifique américain ayant travaillé sur ces aspects, à la retraite. Le but de la manoeuvre—outre une naturelle escalade des prix et une saine émulation de la performance—était de permettre à une puissance tierce de l’OTAN de pouvoir commercialiser elle-même des technologies pour fournir Israël en seconde main, ainsi que d’autres clients selon les opportunités où les USA n’auraient pas souhaiter s’impliquer directement. Cela contredit l’image d’une France qui s’est constitué sous la férule seule d’un de Gaule farouchement opposé à l’allégeance US. D’un autre côté, on se doute que le plan Marshall devait s’accompagner de quelques renoncements.

Qui a des informations sur ce point?

Cela pourrait éclairer l’affirmation que des représailles pour rompre le partenariat de transfert technologique de l’USA vers l’UE serait de toutes façons sans conséquence, vu que ce transfert est nul.

Mini-sondage. Que lisez-vous quand on parle de “technologies avancées”? Que cache le programme JSF? De quelles technologies si avancées s’agit-il pour mettre en place un tel système?

Belgian mayors raise voices against nukes
19.04.2005 - 09:56 CET | By Elitsa Vucheva

Some two hundred Belgian mayors have responded positively to the call for the worldwide abolition of all nuclear weapons by 2020, and for the withdrawal of US nukes from Europe.

The Belgian mayors are calling on their government to focus on its own disarmament obligations, but also on the need for nuclear disarmament in general, during the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty review conference, which begins 2 May, in New York.

Moreover, they would like to see Belgium being the initiator of an international conference aiming to negotiate a worldwide ban on nuclear weapons.

The mayors are also calling for a removal of US nuclear weapons from Kleine Brogel (Belgium) and Europe in general.

The US is the only country to have nuclear weapons stationed in the territory of other countries.

The initial call came from the mayors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Hiroshima’s mayor, Mr Tadatoshi Akiba, visited Belgium at the beginning of this year, explaining his “2020 vision”, and asking for support for a complete abolition of nuclear weapons by 2020.

Following Mr Akiba’s visit, some Belgian mayors called on all of their colleagues to join the network of the Mayors for Peace World Conference, presided by Mr Akiba.

Currently, some 1 000 mayors worldwide are said to have joined it.

A delegation of Belgian mayors will meet the Belgian Minister of Foreign Affairs Karel De Gucht today (19 April), before some of them leave for the Non-Proliferation Treaty review conference in New York.

http://euobserver.com/?aid=18882&rk=1

Si la France votait non (comme nous sommes très nombreux à le souhaiter, entre gens d’une gauche véritable), le ballon néo-capitaliste, de provenance américaine, qui essaie de s’arrimer en Europe, après la création de bases US solides sur ce continent (par exemple Camp Bondsteel), serait condamné à errer sans attaches.
Car la Constitution européenne de Giscard, légèrement revue par une “élite” de la Gauche européenne, contient une structure politique sans précédent, prônant par exemple une
“libéralisation des services au-delà de la mesure qui est obligatoire en vertu de la loi-cadre européenne adoptée en application de l’article III-147, paragr; I…( Constitution Européenne, Article III-148).
L’ OTAN est nommée (sous son sigle !) dans l’article 1-140 paragraphe 2), et ainsi de suite.
Cette Constituttion nous lie aux USA.
Cette “défection” française, que nous souhaitons tous, nous, les citoyens des pays d’Europe non consultés, contraindrait les dirigeants télécommandés actuels à déposer leurs mandats.
Quel bouleversement dans les partis de gauche qui ont accepté sans barguigner l’attaque de la Serbie en mars 1999, et participé (hormis la France et la Belgique), à l’invasion de l’Irak en 2003.