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FRANCE - Jacques Chirac, un Texan à l’Elysée  
Alors que Condoleeza Rice arrive en France avec pour mission implicite de préparer un rabibochage Washington-Paris, la photo, énorme, occupe un bon tiers de la page : un portrait de Jacques Chirac en costard-cravate, le regard sérieux. Le titre qui l’accompagne a de quoi surprendre : “Un Texan à Paris”. L’hebdomadaire de Hambourg Die Zeit l’annonce sans détour : “Le président français aime l’Amérique. Maintenant, il n’aspire qu’à réparer son comportement envers Bush.” 

Jacques Chirac héraut de l’opposition à la guerre en Irak, nouveau “porte-drapeau de l’antiaméricanisme” ? Die Zeit balaie tout cela d’un geste et brosse le portrait d’un américanophile de longue date qui se targue de “mieux connaître les Etats-Unis que la plupart des Français”. L’hebdomadaire allemand raconte les aventures d’un jeune Français qui traversait les Etats-Unis en auto-stop et travaillait à droite et à gauche : conducteur de chariots élévateurs dans une brasserie de Saint Louis ou dans une chaîne de restaurant de Boston, journaliste pour The Times-Picayune de La Nouvelle-Orléans. Il évoque l’homme qui, selon une habitude “tout sauf française”, raffole de la junk-food américaine et qui, de chaque voyage outre-Atlantique, revient lesté de “quelques kilos d’embonpoint”. Il rappelle aussi, au passage, l’existence d’une petite amie en Caroline du Sud, Florence, qui “avait des taches de rousseur et conduisait un cabriolet blanc”.

Die Zeit se souvient aussi qu’en 1983 Ed Koch, alors maire de New York, était revenu d’un voyage à Paris enchanté d’avoir rencontré “un jeune Américain unique en son genre, qui parlait avec un accent français et s’appelait Jacques Chirac”.
Qu’ajouter de plus ? Qu’en 1988 Ronald Reagan a soutenu la candidature de Jacques Chirac face à François Mitterrand et que, peut-être, et surtout, “rarement un président américain n’aura parlé aussi chaleureusement de Jacques Chirac que George Bush”… George Bush père, bien entendu. “Avec son fils, cela ne se passe pas aussi bien”, reconnaît Die Zeit.

Mais, justement, comment expliquer ces tensions nouvellement survenues entre Washington et Paris ? Certes, “Chirac est et reste un sceptique de la première heure” face à Bush ; il ne se cache pas pour dénoncer le caractère “réactionnaire” de l’administration Bush. Cependant, Die Zeit rappelle qu’en 2000, “avant même le recompte des voix en Floride”, Jacques Chirac s’était précipité pour être le premier à téléphoner et féliciter le nouveau président américain. Après le 11 septembre 2001, “Chirac était à nouveau le premier à se rendre à la Maison-Blanche, pour assurer à Bush : ‘Vous pouvez compter sur nous.’”

Alors ? Die Zeit reprend à son compte l’affirmation du Premier ministre français Jean-Pierre Raffarin : “Bush et Chirac sont deux Texans.” Et cite la nouvelle secrétaire aux Affaires étrangères américaine, Condoleezza Rice : les relations transatlantiques “sont meilleures en pratique qu’en théorie”. En dépit de “différences stratégiques”, observe Die Zeit, il existe de nombreux “plans de travail commun”, depuis les interventions conjointes en Afghanistan, en Haïti ou dans le Sud asiatique ravagé par le tsunami.

Seule petite anicroche dans cette “confiance” renaissante entre les deux chancelleries : l’envie de Chirac “d’écrire l’Histoire”, estime Die Zeit. Le président français, critique envers la mondialisation, aime se faire le chantre de la lutte planétaire contre la pauvreté, les catastrophes écologiques, le racisme et la guerre. Dans cette perspective, observe le journal allemand, “il pourrait à nouveau se trouver à l’étroit dans le nouveau partage des tâches que les Américains ont prévu pour lui”. 

Plus une question qu un commentaire: la carotte n est elle pas un (nouvel) accord sur le nucleaire civil international - un cartel international en fait - qui incluerait l Iran car au fond si on se souvient bien du temps du Shah un accord etait envisage par les Etats unis (et vraisemblalement les “alliers”) de construire sept centrales nucleaires en Iran et de faire de ce pays le centre du nucleaire civil pour le Moyen orient.
Comme dirait le Mullah de service: “le nucleaire vaut bien une messe”.

Plus une question qu un commentaire: est ce que la Constitution europeenne (et notamment son manque de reference a “l heritage” chretien n est pas deja un :evenement exterieur (...) destabio;isant pour l Amerique “(actuelle)  plus important que la competition avec Airbus ?

votre article est très intéressant. Cependant je pense que Sarko est un jeune homme trop pressé et en France pour accéder à la magistrature suprême il faut avoir de la bouteille, les Français adorent élire des vieux, car l’âge amène une certaine sagesse. Aussi Sarko devra certainement attendre 20 ans avant d’avoir le bon âge, cela va être long pour lui…

Personellement je suis plutôt enclin à croire que Chirac se représentera car il veut laisser une empreinte dans l’histoire, si tel est le cas, je ne vois pas comment Sarko pourrait organiser une primaire contre le Président sortant, on n’est pas en Amérique ici, et les gens ne le comprendraient pas. Si Chirac se représente il sera certainement réélu, je ne vois personne pouvant s’opposer à lui d’une façon crédible ni à droite, ni à gauche.
En plus Sarko a quelque chose qui jouera contre lui et que les Français connaitront bientôt, au cas ils ne le sauraient pas déjà, avoir un père Hongrois et une mère Macédonienne ne sera pas le moment venu une aide bien précieuse pour lui. Pour être élu Président de La République Française, selon un article non-écrit dans notre constitution, il faut être d’origine française, il ya eu un précédent avec Balladur qui était né en Turquie, et au dernier moment les Français ont préféré un Gaulois qui savait caresser le cul des vaches plutôt qu’un homme coincé comme le pauvre Balladur. Sarko devrait méditer cela avant d’essayer de se présenter. Enfin c’est juste mon point de vue.

Bonjour.
Vous n’avez rien dit du prix et de l’organisation de ces élections par une agence onusienne basée à Amman.
Je pense que des commentaires significatifs pourraient être obtenus de la part de la personne qui avait commencé à gérer ce mic-mac et a jeté l’éponge en octobre 2004, car il n’y croyait plus. A ce moment-là il avait déjà amassé 350 millions de dollars pour cette mise en scène.
Je vous joins ici son adresse e-mail actuelle (il est maintenant basé à Bukavu). Il s’agit de Jean-Paul Vogels, e-mail:

Compliments.

Je vous annonce la sortie d’un tout nouveau magazine mensuel DSI (DEFENSE ET SECURITE INTERNATIONALE) diffusé dans toute la France à partir du 05.02.05.

L’objectif de DSI est d’offrir une alternative française et francophone aux grandes revues anglo saxonnes que sont JANE’S (UK) et DEFENSE NEWS (USA). Pour ce faire, DSI réunit dans son équipe éditoriale des spécialistes reconnus du monde de la Défense (Jean Dominique Merchet de Libération, Roland Laffitte des Cahiers de l’Orient, Renaud Bellais d’EADS, Stephane Ferrard d’Hachette, etc).

Dans chaque numéro sont proposés plusieurs thématiques présentées sous forme de dossiers (géopolitique, géostratégique, économie de la défense, histoire militaire…)

Informations supplémentaires sur les sites
http://www.defense-presse.com
http://www.geostrategique.net

Cordialement,

January 29, 2005
United States and Europe Differ Over Strategy on Iran
By ELAINE SCIOLINO

Correction Appended
PARIS, Jan. 28 - President Bush’s second term has barely begun, and Iran is already shaping up as its most serious diplomatic challenge. But conflicting pronouncements by Mr. Bush and his national security team have left Iran frustrated and angry about the direction of American policy, and the Europeans more determined than ever to push Washington to embrace their engagement strategy.

To the outside world, the administration seems divided over whether to promote the overthrow of Iran’s Islamic Republic - perhaps by force - or to tacitly support the approach embraced by the Europeans, which favors negotiations and a series of incentives that would ultimately require American participation.

“You need to get everybody to read from the same page, the Europeans and the Americans,” said Mohamed ElBaradei, head of the International Atomic Energy Agency, in an interview in Davos on Friday.

“This is not a process that is going to be solved by the Europeans alone,” he added. “The United States needs to be engaged. If you continue to say they are going to fail before you give them a chance, it will be a self-fulfilling policy.”

France’s foreign minister, Michel Barnier, echoed those remarks in an interview in Paris on Friday. “I cannot explain American policy to you,” he said. “That would be French arrogance and I am not someone who is arrogant. But I think that the Americans must get used to the fact that Europe is going to act. And in this case, without the United States we run the risk of failure.”

France, Germany and Britain - with European Union support - opened negotiations with Iran last month that could give Iran generous rewards on nuclear energy, trade and economic, political and security cooperation if Iran can provide guarantees that it is not developing a nuclear weapon.

The negotiations flow from Iran’s voluntary decision in November to temporarily freeze its programs to make enriched uranium, which can be used for producing energy or for making bombs.

Instead of embracing the initiative, Mr. Bush began his second term with a sweeping pledge to defend the United States and protect its friends “by force of arms if necessary” and a refusal to rule out military action against Iran.

In her Senate confirmation hearings as secretary of state, Condoleezza Rice did not say no when asked whether the goal of the United States was to replace the Islamic Republic in Iran.

Vice President Dick Cheney, too, has put Iran at the “top of the list” of the world’s trouble spots and suggested that Israel might attack Iran militarily because of its nuclear program. Those words, combined with a report in The New Yorker that secret Pentagon operations were under way in Iran to prepare target lists for possible military action, have left the impression - particularly in Tehran - that Iran may be the next Iraq.

“Madness,” is how Iran’s president, Mohammad Khatami, described that approach, while his foreign minister, Kamal Kharrazi, dismissed the talk of a military strike as “psychological warfare.”

Britain joined the American-led war in Iraq while France and Germany opposed it. But when it comes to Iran, the three European countries are unanimous in support of negotiations over any possible military plans by the United States or Israel.

“This is a hotbed region; the last thing we need is a military conflict in that region,” Chancellor Gerhard Schröder of Germany said in Davos on Friday. “I’m very explicit and outspoken about this because I want everybody to know where Germany stands.”

The British foreign secretary, Jack Straw, has also strongly criticized a possible military attack on Iran as “inconceivable.” Mr. Straw told the BBC that the issue of a military option was not raised during his talks with Ms. Rice and other officials in Washington this week.

But European officials say the signals emanating from Washington have been inconsistent. At one point in her confirmation hearings, Ms. Rice suggested that the United States implicitly supported the European negotiating approach, saying the Bush administration is “trying to see” if it will produce concrete results, though she and other officials in Washington have bluntly told the Europeans they are skeptical.

Ms. Rice also repeated a threat to ask the Security Council for censure or possible sanctions against Iran, and specified that even a complete halt to Iran’s nuclear and missile programs would not translate into American support for a policy of engagement and incentives.

There were “other problems” that precluded such an approach: “terrorism, our past, their human rights record,” she said.

Further complicating the picture is that in a news conference in late December, Mr. Bush uncharacteristically admitted the limits of American power. “We’re relying upon others, because we’ve sanctioned ourselves out of influence with Iran,” he said, in reference to the fact that the United States has long banned most trade and investment with Iran and has no diplomatic relations with it.

The Europeans have made the determination that any negotiation that slows and perhaps eventually halts Iran’s nuclear program is better than the alternatives proposed by the United States.

“Is this approach free of risks? No,” said Javier Solana, the European Union’s foreign policy chief, in a telephone interview. “Does it have a guarantee of success? No. But at this point in time it is the only game in town, no doubt about that. The other options are worse.”

Some senior Iranian officials make the same point. “The West has suspicions about our nuclear program; we have suspicions of the Europeans,” said M. Javad Zarif, the Iranian ambassador to the United Nations and a key negotiator with the Europeans, in a telephone interview. “We are eager to use any possible avenue to resolve those suspicions,” Dr. Zarif said. “That’s why we have had the pragmatism to understand that the European game is a very serious game. Washington has yet to understand that the European game is the only game in town.”

Thus far, the three sets of “working level” talks on nuclear, economic and technological cooperation and political and security cooperation have yielded no concrete results, European officials said.

On the contrary, in their meeting on Jan. 17, Iran insisted that it would never abandon its goal of “maintaining” its enrichment program, while the Europeans called such an approach “unacceptable,” insisting on the ultimate permanent cessation of the program, one of the European participants in the meeting said.

Similarly, the most recent inspection team of the International Atomic Energy Agency, the United Nations’ nuclear monitoring organization, to Iran this month came away with less than it hoped for.

Iran allowed the team to visit part of a huge military facility, called Parchin. The Bush administration has long suspected that testing of high explosives in one area of the site could be part of a program to develop a nuclear warhead. Iran insists that all of its nuclear work is for civilian purposes.

Iran was under no international treaty obligation to allow the inspection and it stopped inspectors from visiting a bunker for high-explosive testing of conventional weapons.
In the interview today, Dr. ElBaradei confirmed that the International Atomic Energy Agency had asked for a return visit. “We’re looking at testing grounds, yes,” he said, adding, “We try to go everywhere we think there might have been possible use of nuclear material that has not been declared to us.”

Meanwhile, the Europeans cannot deliver on some of the more ambitious rewards they are discussing with Iran under their accord because they depend on American approval.
In conversations with Ms. Rice and other administration officials since Mr. Bush’s re-election, for example, the Europeans have tried but failed to persuade them to accept Iran’s application to open membership talks with the World Trade Organization.

All of Iran’s European negotiating partners have argued that one of the best ways to promote democracy would be to force more transparency into Iran’s economy. That could help break the stranglehold of the vast system of government-protected “foundations,” most of them the private fiefs of powerful clerics, European officials said.
“You cannot just ask Iran to renounce its nuclear program,” said Mr. Barnier. “You have to allow it to be a positive actor, to enter in this constructive logic of stability. It’s a ‘win-win’ deal that we have proposed.”

Correction: Jan. 31, 2005, Monday

An article on Saturday about differences between the United States and Europe over strategy in addressing Iran’s nuclear programs carried an incomplete byline. Mark Landler reported from Davos, Switzerland, where he interviewed Mohamed ElBaradei, director general of the International Atomic Energy Agency; as noted, Elaine Sciolino reported from Paris.

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/01/29/international/europe/29iran.html?th

One third of EU citizens unaware of European Constitution

28.01.2005 - 07:21 CET | By Honor Mahony
EUOBSERVER / BRUSSELS - With several member states beginning the long path to ratification of the European Constitution, a new poll has shown that a high percentage of EU citizens feel they know little about its content and a third are completely unaware of the document.

A eurobarometer poll due to be published next week, and obtained by the EUobserver, says that just 11 percent of EU citizens have heard of the Constitution and feel they know its contents.

Thirty-three percent have never heard of the new EU charter which was signed with great ceremony last year and is to be put to a referendum in at least nine member states - starting in Spain next month.

In individual member states, the figures are higher - 50% of Britons, 45% of Irish and 39% of Portuguese are unaware of the document.

“These figures might change with the intensification of the public debate”, suggests eurobarometer in notes adjoining the statistics.

There is also a high lack of knowledge about what is in the 460-article treaty agreed by EU governments last June.

Only 39% of citizens know that the Constitution does not foresee the creation of a direct European tax; meanwhile only 38% of respondents know that the President of the European Council will not be directly elected by citizens and only 38% are aware of the petition right.

Overall, 56% say they know very little about it contents.

The highest rate of correct answers to the six items tested occurred in Finland, Denmark, Belgium and Slovenia.

More Britons against than in favour
The UK, which many feel may reject the Constitution in its planned referendum next year, has among the most extreme results.

At 30%, it has the most people against the Constitution; while, at 20%, the least in favour of the document.

This contrasts strongly with Italy and Belgium where the figures in favour are 72% and 70% respectively.

Sixty-seven per cent of citizens in Ireland and Cyprus meanwhile answered “don’t know” when asked about their attitudes towards the Constitution.

Information campaign
Socialists MEPs have called for an information campaign across Europe on the back of these results.

“In order to have a successful campaign for the Yes, the level of information has clearly got to be improved”, said UK labour MEP Richard Corbett.

Dutch Socialist MEP Jan Marinus Wiersma said “My overall impression is that there is still intensive effort necessary to inform everybody”.

The Constitution, which will introduce an EU foreign minister, a permanent chair of the EU and greater powers to the European Parliament, has to be ratified by all 25 member states before it can come into force.

The poll was carried out between October and November last year by TNS Opinion/EOS Gallup Europe and 24,786 citizens were surveyed.
http://euobserver.com/?aid=18272&rk=1

Eurobarometer on Constitution: a positive attitude, but a lack of information

More than half of the citizens of the European Union say they know little about the Draft Constitution and a third more declare they have never heard about it. At the same time the study also shows that the public opinion is rather favourable to the Constitution, but that the indecision level remains high in most countries. This is the result of a special Eurobarometer poll realised between the 27th of October and the 29th of November 2004 among a sample of nearly 25.000 persons

http://europa.eu.int/rapid/pressReleasesAction.do?reference=IP/05/104&format=HTML&aged=0&language=en&guiLanguage=en

‘Robo-Soldier’ Prepares For Iraq
Associated Press
January 23, 2005

ENGLEWOOD CLIFFS, N.J. - The rain is turning to snow on a blustery January morning, and all the men gathered in a parking lot here surely would prefer to be inside. But the weather couldn’t matter less to the robotic sharpshooter they are here to watch as it splashes through puddles, the barrel of its machine gun pointing the way like Pinocchio’s nose. The Army is preparing to send 18 of these remote-controlled robotic warriors to fight in Iraq beginning in March or April.

Made by a small Massachusetts company, the SWORDS, short for Special Weapons Observation Reconnaissance Detection Systems, will be the first armed robotic vehicles to see combat, years ahead of the larger Future Combat System vehicles currently under development by big defense contractors such as Lockheed Martin and General Dynamics Corp.
It’s easy to humanize the SWORDS (a tendency robotics researchers say is only human) as it moves out of the flashy lobby of an office building and into the cold with nary a shiver.

Military officials like to compare the roughly three-foot-high robots favorably to human soldiers: They don’t need to be trained, fed or clothed. They can be boxed up and warehoused between wars. They never complain. And there are no letters to write home if they meet their demise in battle.

But officials are quick to point out that these are not the autonomous killer robots of science fiction. A SWORDS robot shoots only when its human operator presses a button after identifying a target on video shot by the robot’s cameras.

“The only difference is that his weapon is not at his shoulder, it’s up to half a mile a way,” said Bob Quinn, general manager of Talon robots for Foster-Miller Inc., the Waltham, Mass., company that makes the SWORDS. As one Marine fresh out of boot camp told Quinn upon seeing the robot: “This is my invisibility cloak.”
Quinn said it was a “bootstrap development process” to convert a Talon robot, which has been in military service since 2000, from its main mission - defusing roadside bombs in Iraq- into the gunslinging SWORDS.

It was a joint development process between the Army and Foster-Miller, a robotics firm bought in November by QinetiQ Group PLC, which is a partnership between the British Ministry of Defence and the Washington holding company The Carlyle Group.
Army officials and employees of the robotics firm heard from soldiers “who said ‘My brothers are being killed out here. We love the EOD (explosive ordnance disposal), but let’s put some weapons on it,’” said Quinn.

Working with soldiers and engineers at Picatinny Arsenal in New Jersey, it took just six months and only about $2 million in development money to outfit a Talon with weapons, according to Quinn and Anthony Sebasto, a technology manager at Picatinny.

The Talon had already proven itself to be pretty rugged. One was blown off the roof of a Humvee and into a nearby river by a roadside bomb in Iraq. Soldiers simply opened its shrapnel-pocked control unit and drove the robot out of the river, according to Quinn.
The $200,000, armed version will carry standard-issue Squad Automatic Weapons, either the M249, which fires 5.56-millimeter rounds at a rate of 750 per minute, or the M240, which can fire about 700 to 1,000 7.62-millimeter rounds per minute. The SWORDS can fire about 300 rounds using the M240 and about 350 rounds using the M249 before needing to reload.
All its optics equipment - the four cameras, night vision and zoom lenses - were already in the Army’s inventory.

“It’s important to stress that not everything has to be super high tech,” said Sebasto. “You can integrate existing componentry and create a revolutionary capability.”
The SWORDS in the parking lot at the headquarters of the cable news station CNBC had just finished showing off for the cameras, climbing stairs, scooting between cubicles, even broadcasting some of its video on the air.

Its developers say its tracks, like those on a tank, can overcome rock piles and barbed wire, though it needs a ride to travel faster than 4 mph.
Running on lithium ion batteries, it can operate for 1 to 4 hours at a time, depending on the mission. Operators work the robot using a 30-pound control unit which has two joysticks, a handful of buttons and a video screen. Quinn says that may eventually be replaced by a “Gameboy” type of controller hooked up to virtual reality goggles.

The Army has been testing it over the past year at Picatinny and the Aberdeen Proving Grounds in Maryland to ensure it won’t malfunction and can stand up to radio jammers and other countermeasures. (Sebasto wouldn’t comment on what happens if the robot and its controller fall into enemy hands.)
Its developers say the SWORDS not only allows its operators to fire at enemies without exposing themselves to return fire, but also can make them more accurate.

A typical soldier who could hit a target the size of a basketball from 300 meters away could hit a target the size of a nickel with the SWORDS, according Quinn.
The better accuracy stems largely from the fact that its gun is mounted on a stable platform and fired electronically, rather than by a soldier’s hands, according to Staff Sgt. Santiago Tordillos of the EOD Technology Directorate at Picatinny. Gone are such issues as trigger recoil, anticipation problems, and pausing the breathing cycle while aiming a weapon.

“It eliminates the majority of shooting errors you would have,” said Tordillos.
Chances are good the SWORDS will get even more deadly in the future. It has been tested with the larger .50 caliber machine guns as well as rocket and grenade launchers - even an experimental weapon made by the Australian company Metal Storm LLC that packs multiple rocket rounds into a single barrel, allowing for much more rapid firing.

“We’ve fired 70 shots at Picatinny and we were 70 for 70 hitting the bull’s-eye,” said Sebasto, boasting of the arsenal’s success with a Vietnam-era rocket launcher mounted on a SWORDS.

There are bound to be many eyes watching SWORDS as it heads to battle. Its tracks will one day be followed by the larger vehicles of the Future Combat System, such as six-wheel-drive MULE under development by Lockheed Martin, a 2.5-ton vehicle with motors in each wheel hub to make it more likely to survive.

The Pentagon’s research arm, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, also recently awarded contracts to aid research of robots that one day could be dropped into combat from airplanes and others meant to scale walls using electrostatic energy - also known as “static cling.”
Many of the vehicles being developed for the FCS will have some autonomy, meaning they’ll navigate rough terrain, avoid obstacles and make decisions about certain tasks on their own.
They may be able to offer cues to their operators when potential foes are near, but it’s doubtful any of them will ever be allowed to make the decision to pull the trigger, according to Jim Lowrie, president of Perceptek Inc., a Littleton, Colo., firm that is developing robotics systems for the military.

“For the foreseeable future, there always will be a person in the loop who makes the decision on friend or foe. That’s a hard problem to determine autonomously,” said Lowrie.

http://www.military.com/Content/Printer_Friendly_Version/1,11491,,00.html?str_filename=FL%5Frobot%5F012305&passfile=FL%5Frobot%5F012305&page_url=%2FNewsContent%2F0%2C13319%2CFL%5Frobot%5F012305%2C00%2Ehtml

La revue Mother Jones, publie cet intéressant article de l’analyste financier Marshall Auerback sur l’inévitable catastrophe à laquelle mènera très probablement la dette hallucinante (7, 5 trillons de dollars, c’est-à-dire 7.500.0000.000.000 $)d’un empire qui croit pouvoir s’acheter la domination du monde à crédit.

Si vous avez placé vos économies dans des actions ou des obligations US, il commence sans doute à être temps d’envisager d’autres placements, un peu moins virtualistes….

http://www.motherjones.com/news/dailymojo/2005/01/what_could_go_wrong.html

“What Could Go Wrong in 2005?
By Marshall Auerback

In his 1849 novel, Les Guepes, Alphonse Karr penned the classic line: “The more things change, the more they stay the same.” In the case of the United States in 2005, however, the opposite might be true: The more things stay the same, the more they are likely to change…for the worse. In that regard, compiling a list of potential threats to the U.S. this year has a strangely déjà-vu-all-over-again feeling. After all, such a list would represent nothing more than a longstanding catalogue of economic policy-making run amok. Virtually the same list could have been drawn up in 2004, or 2003, or previous years.

Such threats would include: a persistent and increasing resort to debt-financed growth and a concomitant, growing imbalance in the trade deficit, leading the U.S. ever further into financial dependency and so leaving it dangerously indebted to rival nations, which could (at least theoretically) pull the plug at any time. This, in turn, is occurring against the backdrop of an increasingly problematic, Vietnam-style quagmire in Iraq, against imperial overstretch, and against a related ongoing crisis in energy prices, itself spurring an ever more frantic competition for energy security, which will surely intensify existing global and regional rivalries.

Just as a haystack soaked in kerosene will appear relatively benign until somebody strikes a match; so too, although America’s longstanding economic problems have not yet led to financial Armageddon, this in no way invalidates the threat ultimately posed. For economy watchers in 2005, the key, of course, is to imagine which event (or combination of them) might represent the match that could set this “haystack” alight—if there is indeed one “event” which has the capability of precipitating the bursting of a historically unprecedented credit bubble.

The odd thing about credit bubbles is that they have no determined resolution, nor is there anything about such a dynamic that specifies the path by which it will be reversed; nor is there some specific level of financial excess guaranteed to eventually put an end to it. The beginning of that end could potentially be set off at any level at any time. Nevertheless, it is possible to sketch out several scenarios which could conceivably, in the eleven months left to 2005, trigger such a reversal or even something approaching economic collapse.

Debt: A Policy on Steroids

The Achilles heel of the American economy is certainly debt. It is generally assumed that increases in credit stimulate consumer demand. In the short run that is true, but the long run is another matter altogether. When debt levels are as high as those the U.S. is carrying today, further increases in debt created by credit expansion can come to act as a burden on demand. Signs of this are already in the air—or rather in what has been, by historic standards, only feeble economic growth in the U.S. economy over George Bush’s first term in office.

Think of the present mountain of national debt as the policy equivalent of steroids. It has so far managed to create a reasonably flattering picture of economic prosperity, much as steroid use in baseball has flattered the batting averages of some of game’s stars over the past decade. But unlike major league baseball, forced to act by scandal and Senate threats, America’s monetary and financial officials still refuse to implement policies designed to curb the growth of a steroidal debt burden. If anything, addiction has set in and policy has increasingly appeared designed to encourage ever larger doses of indebtedness. Each bailout or promise of a government safety net has only led to more of the same: the Penn Central crisis; the Chrysler and Lockheed bailouts; the rescue of much of the savings and loan as well as commercial banking system in the early 1990’s; the 1998 bailout of the hedge fund Long Term Capital Management; and the persistent reluctance of U.S. officials to regulate the country’s increasingly speculative financial system, which has led not only to fiascos like Enron—the 21st century poster child for what ails the US economy—but speaks to the dangers of excessive debt, corrupt financial practices, highly dubious accounting, and endless conflicts of interest.

The result of this reluctance to confront the consequences of America’s credit excesses—a federal government debt level that is now at $7.5 trillion. Of this, $1 trillion is ancient history; the other $6.5 trillion has built up over the past three decades; the last $2 trillion in the past eight years; and the last $1 trillion in the past two years alone. According to the economist Andre Gunder Frank, “All Uncle Sam’s debt, including private household consumer credit-card, mortgage etc. debt of about $10 trillion, plus corporate and financial, with options, derivatives and the like, and state and local government debt comes to an unvisualizable, indeed unimaginable, $37 trillion, which is nearly four times Uncle Sam’s GDP [gross domestic product].” This rising level of indebtedness will become a huge deflationary weight on economic activity if debt growth should seriously slow – which is the economic equivalent of a Catch-22.

The “Blanche Dubois” Economy

The situation of the American economy becomes yet more precarious when you consider that the country’s major creditors are foreigners. Today, the U.S. economy is being kept afloat by enormous levels of foreign lending, which allow American consumers to continue to buy more imports, which only increase the already bloated trade deficits. In essence, this could be characterized in Streetcar Named Desire terms as a “Blanche Dubois economy,” heavily dependent as it is on “the kindness of strangers” in order to sustain its prosperity. This is also a distinctly lopsided arrangement that would end, probably with a bang, if those foreign creditors—major trading partners like Japan, China, and Europe—simply decided, for whatever reasons, to substantially reduce the lending.

China, Japan, and other major foreign creditors are believed willing to sustain the status quo because their own industrial output and employment levels are thought to be worth more to them than risking the implosion of their most important consumer market, but that, of course, assumes levels of rationality not necessarily found in any global system in a moment of crisis. All you have to do is imagine the first hints of things economic spinning out of control and it’s easy enough to imagine as well that China or Japan, facing their own internal economic challenges, might indeed give them primacy over sustaining the American consumer. If, for example, a banking crisis developed in China (which has its own “bubble” worries), Beijing might well feel it had no choice but to begin selling off parts of its U.S. bond holdings in order to use the capital at home to stabilize its financial system or assuage political unrest among its unemployed masses. Then think for a moment: global house of cards.

Already China has given indications of its long-term intentions on this matter: Roughly 50% of China’s growth in foreign exchange since 2001 has been placed into dollars. Last year, however, while China saw its reserves grow by $112 billion, the dollar portion of that was only 25% or $25 billion, according to the always well-informed Montreal-based financial consultancy firm, Bank Credit Analyst.

Beijing has already made it clear that it will spread its reserves and put less emphasis on the dollar. As one of America’s largest foreign creditors, China naturally has the upper hand today, like any banker who can call in a loan when he sees the borrower hopelessly mired in IOUs. If such foreign capital increasingly moves elsewhere and easy credit disappears for consumers, U.S. interest rates could rise sharply. As a result, many Americans would likely experience a major decline in their living standards—a gradual grinding-down process that could continue for years, as has occurred in Japan since the collapse of its credit bubble in the early 1990s.

Even if China, Japan, and other East Asian nations continue to accommodate American financial profligacy, a major economic “adjustment” in the U.S. could still be triggered simply by the sheer financial exhaustion of its overextended consumers. After all, the country already has a recession-sized fiscal deficit and zero household savings. That’s a combination that’s never been seen before. In the early 1980’s, when the federal deficit was this size, the household savings rate was 9%. This base of savings enabled the government to finance its vast deficits for a time through a huge one-time fall in net savings, the scale of which was historically unprecedented and not repeatable today in a savings-less America.

At the Edge: Imperial Overstretch

A restoration of national savings is fundamentally incompatible with continued economic growth, all other things being equal. And the United States can ill-afford even lagging economic growth, given the magnitude of its burgeoning – and expensive – overseas military commitments, especially in an Iraq that is beginning to look like Vietnam redux.

President Bush likes to compare his combination of economic, military, and diplomatic strategies with President Reagan’s blend of tax cuts, military assertiveness, and massive borrowing in the 1980s. His economic advisers, especially Vice President Dick (“deficits don’t matter”) Cheney, appear to believe that the present huge trade and fiscal deficits will prove no more disruptive in the next decade than they were in the Reagan years.

But if we turn to the Vietnam parallel, we find a less comforting historical precedent: the decision, first by President Johnson and then by President Nixon, to finance that unpopular conflict through borrowing and inflation, rather than higher taxes. The ultimate result of their cumulative Vietnam decisions was not just a military humiliation but also a series of economic crises that first caught up with the country in the late 1960s and continued periodically until 1982.

In a sense, the dollar’s continuing fall last year (especially against the euro) in spite of significant interventions by central banks in the global foreign exchange markets, reflects a similar loss of respect for U.S. policy-making – and especially for the linking of the dollar and the Pentagon through an endless series of foreign adventures. In addition, a national economy that cannot itself produce the things it needs and invests instead in military “security” will eventually find itself in a position in which it has to use its military constantly to take, or threaten to take, from others what it cannot provide for itself, which in turn leads to what Yale historian Paul Kennedy has described as “imperial overstretch”:

“[T]hat is to say, decision-makers in Washington must face the awkward and enduring fact that the sum total of the United States’ global interests and obligations is nowadays far larger than the country’s power to defend them all simultaneously.”

That descent into imperial overstretch explains how in the early 1940s an America much weaker in absolute terms, fighting more evenly matched opponents, could nonetheless prevail against its enemies more quickly than a state with an $11-trillion Gross Domestic Product and a defense budget approaching $500 billion (without even adding in the $80 billion budgetary supplement for Iraq and Afghanistan that the Bush Administration is reputedly preparing for the current fiscal year) fighting perhaps 10,000-20,000 ill-armed insurgents in a state with a pre-war GDP that represents less than the turnover of a large corporation. The U.S. today is a nation with a hollowed-out industrial base and an increasing incapacity to finance a military adventurism propelled by the very forces responsible for that hollowing out.

Oil: The Dividing Line of the New Cold War

And then there is the problem of crude which, despite predictions from ever optimistic financial analysts has once again begun to approach $50 a barrel. The one thing Mr Bush has never mentioned in relation to his Iraq war policy is oil, but back in 2001 former Secretary of State James Baker presciently wrote an essay in a Council on Foreign Relations study of world energy problems that oil could never lurk far from the forefront of American policy considerations:

“Strong economic growth across the globe and new global demands for more energy, have meant the end of sustained surplus capacity in hydrocarbon fuels and the beginning of capacity limitations. In fact, the world is currently precariously close to utilizing all of its available global oil production capacity, raising the chances of an oil supply crisis with more substantial consequences than seen in three decades. These choices will affect other US policy objectives: US policy toward the Middle East; US policy toward the former Soviet Union and China; the fight against international terrorism.”

The CFR report made another salient point clear: “Oil price spikes since the 1940s have always been followed by recession.” In its current debt-riddled condition, further such price spikes could bring on something more than a garden-variety economic downturn for the U.S., especially if some of the major oil-producing nations, such as Russia, follow through on recent threats to denominate their petroleum exports in euros, rather than dollars, which would substantially raise America’s energy bill, given the current weakness of the dollar.

The most recent spike in the price of oil was not simply a reflection of rising political uncertainty and conflict in the Middle East. There are other reasons to expect higher energy price levels over the next two to three decades – the most notable among them being strong demand from emerging economies, especially those of China and India.

The parallel drives for energy security on the part of the United States and China hold the seeds of future conflict as well. Yukon Huang, a senior advisor at the World Bank, recently noted that China’s heavy reliance on oil imports (as well as problems with environmental degradation, including serious water shortages) poses a significant threat to the country’s economic development even over the near-term, the next three to five years.

China’s already vigorous response to this challenge is likely to bring it increasingly up against the United States. Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, for instance, returned from a Christmas trip to China where he apparently sold America’s historic Venezuelan oil supplies to the Chinese together with future prospecting rights. Even Canada (in the words of President Bush, “our most important neighbors to the north”) is negotiating to sell up to one-third of its oil reserves to China. CNOOC, China’s third largest oil and gas group, is actually considering a bid of more that $13 billion for its American rival, Unocal. The real significance of the deal (which, given the size, could not have been contemplated in the absence of Chinese state support) is that it illustrates the emerging competition between China and the U.S. for global influence—and resources.

The drive for resources is occurring in a world where alliances are shifting among major oil-producing and consuming nations. A kind of post-Cold War global lineup against perceived American hegemony seems to be in the earliest stages of formation, possibly including Brazil, China, India, Iran, Russia and Venezuela. Russian President Putin’s riposte to an American strategy of building up its military presence in some of the former SSRs of the old Soviet Union has been to ally the Russian and Iranian oil industries, organize large-scale joint war games with the Chinese military, and work towards the goal of opening up the shortest, cheapest, and potentially most lucrative new oil route of all, southwards out of the Caspian Sea area to Iran. In the meantime, the European Union is now negotiating to drop its ban on arms shipments to China (much to the publicly expressed chagrin of the Pentagon). Russia has also offered a stake in its recently nationalized Yukos, (a leading, pro-Western Russian oil company forced into bankruptcy by the Putin government) to China.

In a one-superpower world, this is pretty brazen behavior by all concerned, but it is symptomatic of a growing perception of the United States as a declining, overstretched giant, albeit one with the capacity to strike out lethally if wounded. American military and economic dominance may still be the central fact of world affairs, but the limits of this primacy are becoming ever more evident—something reflected in the dollar’s precipitous descent on foreign exchange markets. It all makes for a very challenging backdrop to the rest of 2005. Keep an eye out. Perhaps this will indeed be the year when longstanding problems for the United States finally do boil over, but don’t expect Washington to accept the dispersal of its economic and military power lightly.

Marshall Auerback is an international strategist with David W. Tice & Associates, LLC, a USVI-based money management firm. He is also a contributor to the Japan Policy Research Institute. His weekly work can be viewed at prudentbear.com

Copyright C2005 Marshall Auerback “

Comme quoi, Mao n’avait sans doute raison qu’un peu trop tôt quand il qualifiait les US de “tigre de papier” ou de “colosse aux pieds d’argile”....

Un article de site Asia times (intitule
Karachi opens door to US forces)  apporte un peu plus d’informtations sur la participation des SAS aux missions de reconnaissances en Iran.

http://www.atimes.com/atimes/South_Asia/GA19Df05.html

en particulier il y est revele/annonce que les forces speciales US/UK s’entrainent dans la ville meme de Karachi car elle ressemble beaucoup aux villes iraniennes- ce qui laisse presager des actions tres agressives.
A consulter !

vous n’osez pas reconnaitre que c’est les USA eux méme qui ont creer le terrorisme.Il faut savoir aussi qu’il y a de plus en plus de gens qui qui doutent de leurs versions.

Encore un texte intéressant de l’excellent journaliste britannique George Monbiot

Media Fairyland
Filed under: media politics

The US media is creating a world of make believe.

By George Monbiot. Published in the Guardian 18th January 2005

On Thursday, the fairy king of fairyland will be re-crowned. He was elected on a platform suspended in mid air by the power of imagination. He is the leader of a band of men who walk through ghostly realms unvisited by reality. And he remains the most powerful person on earth.

How did this happen? How did a fantasy president from a world of make believe come to govern a country whose power was built on hard-headed materialism? To find out, take a look at two squalid little stories which have been concluded over the past ten days.

The first involves the broadcaster CBS. In September, its 60 Minutes programme ran an investigation into how George Bush avoided the Vietnam draft. It produced memos which appeared to show that his squadron commander in the Texas National Guard had been persuaded to “sugarcoat” his service record. The programme’s allegations were immediately and convincingly refuted: Republicans were able to point to evidence suggesting the memos had been faked. Last week, following an inquiry into the programme, the producer was sacked, and three CBS executives were forced to resign.

The incident couldn’t have been more helpful to Bush. Though there is no question that he managed to avoid serving in Vietnam, the collapse of CBS’s story suggested that all the allegations made about his war record were false, and the issue dropped out of the news. CBS was furiously denounced by the rightwing pundits, with the result that between then and the election, hardly any broadcaster dared to criticise George Bush. Mary Mapes, the producer whom CBS fired, was the network’s most effective investigative journalist: she was the person who helped bring the Abu Ghraib photos to public attention. If the memos were faked, the forger was either a moron or a very smart operator.

It’s true, of course, that CBS should have taken more care. But I think it is safe to assume that if the network had instead broadcast unsustainable allegations about John Kerry, none of its executives would now be looking for work. How many people have lost their jobs, at CBS or anywhere else, for repeating bogus stories released by the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth about Kerry’s record in Vietnam? How many were sacked for misreporting the Jessica Lynch affair? Or for claiming that Saddam Hussein had an active nuclear weapons programme in 2003? Or that he was buying uranium from Niger, or using mobile biological weapons labs, or had a hand in 9/11? How many people were sacked, during Clinton’s presidency, for broadcasting outright lies about the Whitewater affair? The answer, in all cases, is none.

You can say what you like in the US media, as long as it helps a Republican president. But slip up once while questioning him, and you will be torn to shreds. Even the most grovelling affirmations of loyalty won’t help. The presenter of 60 Minutes, Dan Rather, is the man who once told his audience, “George Bush is the President, he makes the decisions and, you know, as just one American, he wants me to line up, just tell me where”.(1) CBS is owned by the conglomerate Viacom, whose chairman told reporters “we believe the election of a Republican administration is better for our company.”(2) But for Fox News and the shockjocks syndicated by ClearChannel, Rather’s faltering attempt at investigative journalism is further evidence of “a liberal media conspiracy”.

This is not the first time something like this has happened. In 1998, CNN made a programme which claimed that, during the Vietnam war, US special forces dropped sarin gas on defectors who had fled to Laos.(3) In this case, there was plenty of evidence to support the story. But after four weeks of furious denunciations, the network’s owner, Ted Turner, publicly apologised in terms you would expect to hear during a showtrial in North Korea: “I’ll take my shirt off and beat myself bloody on the back”. CNN had erred, he said, by broadcasting the allegations when “we didn’t have evidence beyond a reasonable doubt.”(4) As the website wsws.org has pointed out, it’s hard to think of a single investigative story – Watergate, the My Lai massacre, Britain’s arms to Iraq scandal – which could have been proved at the time by journalists “beyond a reasonable doubt”.(5) But Turner did what was demanded of him, with the result that, in media fairyland, the atrocity is now deemed not to have happened.

The other squalid little story broke three days before the CBS people were sacked. A US newspaper discovered that Armstrong Williams, a television presenter who (among other jobs) had a weekly slot on a syndicated TV show called America’s Black Forum, had secretly signed a $240,000 contract with the US Department of Education.(6) The contract required him “to regularly comment” on George Bush’s education bill “during the course of his broadcasts” and to ensure that “Secretary Paige [the Education Secretary] and other department officials shall have the option of appearing from time to time as studio guests”.(7)

It’s hard to see why the administration bothered to pay him. Williams has described as his “mentors” Lee Atwater – the man who, under Reagan’s presidency, brought a new viciousness to Republican campaigning – and the segregationist senator Strom Thurmond.(8) His broadcasting career has been dedicated to promoting extreme Republican causes and attacking civil rights campaigns.

What makes this story interesting is that the show he worked on was founded, in 1977, by the radical black activists Glen Ford and Peter Gamble, to “allow Black reporters to hold politicians and activists of all persuasions accountable to Black people”.(9) They sold their shares in 1980, and the programme was later bought by the Uniworld Group. With Williams’s help, the new owners have reversed its politics, and turned it into a recruitment vehicle for the Republican party. Williams appears to have been taking money for doing what he was doing anyway.

These stories, in other words, are illustrations of the ways in which the US media is disciplined by corporate America. In the first case the other corporate broadcasters joined forces to punish a dissenter in their ranks. In the second case a corporation captured what was once a dissenting programme and turned it into another means of engineering conformity.

The role of the media corporations in the United States is similar to that of repressive state regimes elsewhere: they decide what the public will and won’t be allowed to hear, and either punish or recruit the social deviants who insist on telling a different story. The journalists they employ do what almost all journalists working under repressive regimes do: they internalise the demands of the censor, and understand, before anyone has told them, what is permissible and what is not.

So, when they are faced with a choice between a fable which helps the Republicans, and a reality which hurts them, they choose the fable. As their fantasies accumulate, the story they tell about the world veers further and further from reality. Anyone who tries to bring the people back down to earth is denounced as a traitor and a fantasist. And anyone who seeks to become president must first learn to live in fairyland.

http://www.monbiot.com

Je réagis à un article du Guardian de Londres sur le saccage du site archéologique de Babylone en même temps qu’au votre, qui date d’il y a deux ans, concernant le pillage encouragé du Musée de Baghdad. C’est que je venais de rediffuser l’article de Victor Hugo écrit en 1859 commentant le pillage et le saccage du Palais d’Eté à Pékin, un vandalisme crapuleux commandité et approuvé par le Reine Victoria et l’Emperreur Napoléon III. Victor Hugo termine son article en souhaitant:
” J’espère qu’un jour viendra où la France, délivrée et nettoyée, renverra ce butin à la Chine spoliée.” Bien que la France ait un Président qui, dit-on, apprécie l’art et la culture chinoise, il semble que ce temps n’est pas encore venu.
Donc, voilà, il y a 150 ans, les barbares anglo-français avaient le pouvoir absolu de casser du nègres, du niaque et du chinetoque, et aussi leur patrimoine culturel, pour les nier en tant que peuple, et aujourd’hui c’est leurs meilleurs élèves, les barbares US, qui ont pris le relai.
L’article en question de Victor Hugo a été reproduit dans les pages intérieures du “Monde Diplomatique” du mois d’octobre 2004.

“La guerre a perdu sa cohérence historique, sa fonction régulatrice de renouvellement des situations politiquement bloquées qui étaient sa seule justification acceptable. Clausewitz est KO debout.”

Voici une phrase bien belle et particulièrement pertinente pour décrire la situation.
Mais elle n’est cohérente que pour décrire l’aspect opérationnel de la guerre. C’est parce que l’utilisation stratégique de la guerre comme “solution clausewitzienne” est mal menée que la guerre semble ne plus avoir de sens. Pourtant l’ennemi existe toujours, il suffit d’en désigner physiquement un qui soit à portée.

C’est justement la crise de civilisation comme écrit “d’une ampleur considérable”, qui empêche l’usage de la guerre pour ce qu’elle devrait être.
Car dans le fond c’est une affaire de survie et la question est simple: comment continuer à exploiter les ressources mondiales à notre profit?
L’usage de la force et l’annexion pure et simple apparaissent dans notre civilisation déclinante comme inaceptable. L’alternative, qui est l’acceptation d’une réduction de satisfaction par le partage des ressources, n’arrive pas a l’idée des gouvernements toujours et nécessairement figés dans une attitude actuellement en retrait par rapport à l’évolution idéologique de la société.
La réponse est un écartèlement entre une vision humaniste populaire et la sauvagerie étatique, parfaitement illustrée par la scène du sampan dans “Apocalypse Now”.
Le commandant du patrouilleur remontant la rivière décidant de contrôler un sampan de paysans contre l’avis de Willard. L’affaire évidemment tourne mal et le massacre inutile se conclut justement par l’excution pure et simple des survivants.
Ce type de comportement, caractéristique de la guerre d’Irak, une fois connu, amplifie le malaise et ne fait qu’accélérer la décomposition de la société.
Donc à mon sens la “destruction de la guerre” ne vient pas de l’absence d’ennemi mais du mauvais usage de l’outil “Guerre” parce qu’on ne sait plus l’utiliser.
L’illustration extrème est la déclaration du Président Bush comme quoi “les USA avaient un plan en Irak mais que l’ennemi ne l’a pas respecté”. De quoi mourrir de rire.