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10/09/06
- Cinq
ans de "guerre contre la terreur" : 60.000
à 100.000 morts civils
Un
événement meurtrier et coûteux
Radio Canada 31/08/06
"Les attentats perpétrés par 19 kamikazes le 11
septembre ont fait près de 3000 victimes, y compris les
passagers et membres d'équipage des avions, les personnes
travaillant dans le World Trade Center et au Pentagone, de même
que les pompiers et policiers morts en service...
...Les victimes des deux guerres qui ont suivi, présentées
par Washington comme une réponse aux attentats, sont beaucoup
plus nombreuses. On sait avec certitude qu'elles se comptent
par dizaines de milliers, mais il est impossible d'établir un
bilan précis des victimes civiles.
Victimes en Afghanistan
Le professeur Marc Herold, du département d'économie de
l'Université du New Hampshire, déplore « la gestion de
l'information par l'armée américaine, qui voudrait qu'on
croie que seuls les méchants meurent ». Il a réalisé
le recensement le plus exhaustif des civils afghans tués en
se basant sur des textes d'agences de presse, des articles de
journaux, des chiffres fournis par les organisations non
gouvernementales comme la Croix-Rouge et des témoignages.
(Souvent cité, le site Irak Body Count s'est inspiré de son
travail). « Depuis le 7 octobre 2001, les actions des
forces terrestres et aériennes de la coalition et, plus tard,
celles de l'OTAN [qui assume la direction des opérations en
Afghanistan depuis juillet 2006] ont fait entre 4621 et 5305
morts au sein de la population civile.
Il souligne que ce bilan tient seulement compte des victimes
mortes sur le coup, et dont le décès est documenté, et
exclut les milliers de personnes ayant succombé à leurs
blessures..."
Victimes en Irak
...Le bilan de l'intervention militaire pour les civils
irakiens est beaucoup plus meurtrier encore. Le site Irak Body
Count évalue les pertes civiles à 41 000 ou à 45 600 depuis
l'invasion américaine de 2003. Jocelyn Coulon, directeur du Réseau
francophone de recherche sur les opérations de paix du Centre
d'études de recherche internationales, fait toutefois
remarquer que certains bilans font plutôt état de 100 000
morts. À ces chiffres, il faut également ajouter les
centaines de morts qu'ont faits les tensions
interconfessionnelles entre les communautés chiite et
sunnite..."
62,006
- the number killed in the 'war on terror'
Independant 10/09/06
"The "war on terror" - and by terrorists - has
directly killed a minimum of 62,006 people, created 4.5
million refugees and cost the US more than the sum needed to
pay off the debts of every poor nation on earth.
If estimates of other, unquantified, deaths - of insurgents,
the Iraq military during the 2003 invasion, those not recorded
individually by Western media, and those dying from wounds -
are included, then the toll could reach as high as 180,000.
The extraordinary scale of the conflict's impact, claiming
lives from New York to Bali and London to Lahore, and the
extent of the death tolls in Iraq and Afghanistan, has emerged
from an Independent on Sunday survey to mark the fifth
anniversary of 11 September. It used new, unpublished data
supplied by academics and organisations such as Iraq Body
Count and Professor Marc Herold of the University of New
Hampshire, plus estimates given by other official studies.
The result is the first attempt to gauge the full cost in
blood and money of the worldwide atrocities and military
conflicts that began in September 2001. As of yesterday, the
numbers of lives confirmed lost are: 4,541 to 5,308 civilians
and 385 military in Afghanistan; 50,100 civilians and 2,899
military in Iraq; and 4,081 in acts of terrorism in the rest
of the world..."
10/09/06
- Comment les néoconservateur voient
le Moyen-Orient de demain
Blood
borders
How a better Middle East would look
Armed Force Journal 06/06
Aujourd'hui
Demain
10/09/06
- L'imagination
pour prévenir un 11 Septembre nucléaire
The
ongoing failure of imagination
By Graham Allison, Bulletin
of the Atomic Scientists September/October 2006
"...The principal failure to act to prevent the September
11 attack was a "failure of imagination." A
similar failure of imagination leads many today to discount
the risk of a nuclear 9/11..."
...How could terrorists deliver a nuclear weapon to
its target? Two plausible methods would be to "follow
the golf clubs" or "follow the drugs."...
...terrorists might "follow the drugs," tons of
which find their way to U.S. cities every day. The illicit
economy for narcotics and illegal immigrants has built up a
vast infrastructure that terrorists could exploit. As Albert
Carnesale, an arms control expert, has noted, no one should
doubt the ability of terrorists to bring a nuclear weapon to
New York: They could simply hide it in a bale of marijuana,
which we know comes to all global cities.
In sum, my best judgment is that based on current trends, a
nuclear terrorist attack on the United States is more likely
than not in the decade ahead. Developments in Iraq, Iran, and
North Korea leave Americans more vulnerable to a nuclear 9/11
today than we were five years ago...
...I believe that the largely unrecognized good news is that
this ultimate catastrophe is, in fact, preventable.
There exists a feasible, affordable checklist of actions that,
if taken, would shrink the risk of nuclear terrorism to nearly
zero. The strategic narrow in this challenge is to prevent
terrorists from acquiring nuclear weapons or the materials
from which weapons could be made. If this choke point can be
squeezed tightly enough, we can deny terrorists the means
necessary for the most deadly of all terror acts. As a fact of
physics: No HEU or plutonium, no nuclear explosion, no nuclear
terrorism..."
10/09/06
- L' "irakisation"
de l'Afghanistan
Patrick
Cockburn: Why 'victory' in first phase of war on terror
unravelled
Independant 09/09/06
"...The victory won by President George Bush in 2001
after the 11 September al-Qa'ida attacks on America has
evaporated. "The fighting is extraordinarily intense. The
intensity and ferocity of the fighting is far greater than in
Iraq on a daily basis," the commander of British forces
in Afghanistan, Brig Ed Butler said this week. Taliban units
have taken over swaths of country around Kandahar and are
increasingly active in and around the capital..."
The
Iraqization of Afghanistan
Juan Cole 08/09/06
"...Afghanistan is especially important to Washington
because it is the only plausible way to bring natural gas down
from Turkmenistan to Pakistan and India. The Turkmenistan
alternative is being used to push Delhi away from any
flirtation with an Iranian pipeline.
As Afghanistan falls again into substantial chaos, India is
being forced to reconsider, and to seek to draw on Iran's
Yadavan fields, with a pipeline coming down through Pakistani
Baluchistan and over to the Indian border.
The turn for the worst in Afghanistan may explain the sudden
warming of relations between Delhi and Tehran...
...By deserting Afghanistan to run off to war in Iraq, Bush
ensured that it would risk falling again into social
turbulence, and thus helped seal the fate of the Turkmenistan
pipeline through Herat (wouldn't the Taliban just blow it up?)
In turn, that may have ensured that Iran would be able to
sidestep US sanctions by dealing, not only with China, but
also with India.
And that may mean that Bush let the big fish get away by
getting bogged down in Iraq, which is turning out not to be
any prize for him, either..."
10/09/06
- Bush, Rice, ou
les oscillations perpétuelles sur
l'Iran et la guerre contre la terreur
Bush
personally signed off on Khatami visit: WSJ
Reuters 09/09/06
"President Bush personally signed off on a visa allowing
former Iranian President Mohammed Khatami to visit the United
States because he wanted hear his views, the Wall Street
Journal reported on Saturday.
Khatami, who was Iran's president from 1997 to 2005, is the
most prominent Iranian in decades to visit the United States,
outside of the United Nations' New York headquarters.
His five-city speaking tour is controversial given U.S.
accusations Iran is pursuing nuclear weapons, sponsors
terrorism and arms Hizbollah guerillas in Lebanon.
"I was interested to hear what he had to say," Bush
told the Wall Street Journal in an interview. "I'm
interested in learning more about the Iranian government, how
they think, what people think within the government."..."
"..."My hope is that diplomacy will work in
convincing the Iranians to give up their nuclear weapons
ambitions. And in order for diplomacy to work, it's important
to hear voices other than Ahmadinejad's," Bush added..."
Bush: le régime iranien aussi dangereux qu'Al Qaïda
AFP 05/09/06
"Le président américain George W. Bush a qualifié
mardi le président iranien Mahmoud Ahmadinejad de
"tyran" et a affirmé qu'il fallait empêcher le régime
iranien, aussi dangereux qu'Al-Qaïda selon lui, de se doter
de l'arme nucléaire.
L'extrémisme chiite est "aussi dangereux, aussi hostile
à l'Amérique et aussi déterminé à étendre son hégémonie
sur le grand Proche-Orient" que l'extrémisme sunnite, a
déclaré M. Bush à Washington dans un discours de défense
de l'action américaine contre le terrorisme.
Mais l'extrémisme chiite a réussi là où Al-Qaïda a échoué
en prenant le contrôle d'un pays, l'Iran, en 1979, a-t-il dit
dans cette deuxième allocution d'une nouvelle campagne de
justification de la guerre en Irak, deux mois avant les élections
parlementaires.
"Les dirigeants iraniens qui soutiennent le Hezbollah ont
(...) déclaré leur hostilité absolue à l'Amérique",
a-t-il dit.
Il s'en est pris avec une virulence rarement atteinte à M.
Ahmadinejad qui a selon lui appelé les Américains à
s'incliner devant "la grandeur de la nation
iranienne". "L'Amérique ne s'inclinera pas devant
les tyrans", a lancé M. Bush.
"Le régime iranien et ses sbires terroristes ont démontré
leur volonté de tuer les Américains et le régime iranien
cherche à présent à posséder l'arme nucléaire (...). Les
nations du monde libre ne permettront pas à l'Iran de
produire l'arme nucléaire", a-t-il dit."
Lire également, Read also :
Delirious
rhetoric
Condoleeza Rice flatters her president with empty words as the
war on terror loses all direction
Guardian 07/09/06
"...Bush's relationship with Rice is perhaps the
strangest of his many strange relationships. The mysterious
attachment involves complex transactions of noblesse oblige
and deference, ignorance and adulation, vulnerability and
sweet talk. Like his other female enablers - Karen Hughes, his
political image-maker and undersecretary of state for public
diplomacy, and Harriet Miers, his legal counsel - Rice is
ferociously protective. She shields him from worst-case
scenarios, telling him to ignore criticism, and showers him
with flattery that he is a world-historical colossus.
As national security adviser, before 9/11, Rice protected Bush
from warnings by the counter-terrorism chief, Richard Clarke,
about al-Qaida attacks - and demoted Clarke. Before the
invasion of Iraq, she lent her imprimatur to the
disinformation about Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass
destruction and peddled it to the media. She did not demand an
Iraq postwar stabilisation plan. Nor did she object to the
Pentagon's seizure of Iraq's civil governance responsibilities
from the state department. Before Israel's attack on Lebanon,
she did not caution against the possibility of Israeli failure
against Hizbullah. She was party to the decision to lend full
war materiel and intelligence support to the effort if Israel
would undertake it.
In the beginning, the didactic academic lectured her pupil
that he stood at a crossroads like in 1947, at the making of
the cold-war policy. After 9/11, she inculcated in Bush the
notion that he was a world-builder and could imprint his
design on a scale to match the Peace of Westphalia of 1648
that established the sovereignty of nation-states.
A few months after Rice became secretary of state, in July
2005, she transported senior staff to a West Virginia retreat
where her head of policy planning, Stephen Krasner, delivered
a lecture on the Peace of Westphalia followed by one on the
Truman Doctrine to explain the magnitude of Rice - and Bush's
- ambition for "transformational diplomacy".
This May, as the situation in Iraq drastically worsened, Rice
told senior staff that she wants no more reporting from the
embassies. She announced in a meeting that people write memos
only for each other, and that no one else reads them. She said
she wouldn't read them. Instead of writing reports, the
diplomats should "sell America", she insisted.
"We are salesmen for America!"
On Tuesday, kicking off the mid-term elections campaign, Bush
delivered a speech that cited Bin Laden's screeds, Lenin's
What Is To Be Done? and Hitler's Mein Kampf, and promised
"complete victory". Rice contributed her own
comparison of the "war on terror" to the American
civil war. "I'm sure there are people who thought it was
a mistake to fight the civil war to its end and to insist that
the emancipation of slaves would hold," she said.
But the more delirious the rhetoric, the more hollow the
policy. "There is no plan for Iraq," a senior
national security official with the highest intelligence
clearance and access to the relevant memos told me. "There
is no plan."
10/09/06
- La Chine
menace t-elle l'économie américaine ?
Is China A Threat to the U.S. Economy? (CRS)
FAS 05/09/06
"The emergence of China as a major economic superpower
has raised concern among many U.S. policymakers,"
according to a new report from the Congressional Research
Service.
"Some express concern that China will overtake the United
States as the world's largest trade economy in a few years and
as the world's largest economy within the next two decades. In
this context, China's rise is viewed as America's relative
decline."
See "Is
China a Threat to the U.S. Economy?" (pdf),
August 10, 2006.
04/09/06
- Le bunker
secret de George W. Bush
Is
this Bush's secret bunker?
Guardian 28/08/06
"Mount Weather is a top-security underground installation
an hour's drive from Washington DC. It has its own leaders,
police, fire department - and laws. A cold war relic, it has
been given a new lease of life since 9/11. And no one who's
been inside has ever talked..."
04/09/06
- C'est Tony
Blair qui le dit : aucun mort civil
du à l'invasion en Irak
House
of COMMONS - MINUTES OF EVIDENCE TAKEN BEFORE LIAISON
COMMITTEE - THE PRIME MINISTER Tuesday 4 July 2006
"...Q427 Mr Leigh: Prime Minister, you are not
surely suggesting to this Committee that the ordinary life of
Iraqis has in any conceivable way been improved in terms of
their personal security? These are not politicians, not the
people you talk to. Do you accept that tens of thousands of
Iraqis are now dead as a result of this invasion?
Mr Blair: Well, hang on a minute, they
are not dead as a result of the invasion or the removal of
Saddam. They are dead as the result of the activities of a
criminal minority who want to stop the majority getting the
democracy they want..."
04/09/06
- Difficultés ou ralentissement
volontaire du programme nucléaire iranien ?
Iran's
Centrifuge Program: Defiant but Delayed
By David Albright and Jacqueline Shire
August 31, 2006, The Institute for Science and International
Security (ISIS)
"Iran has made limited progress at its Natanz uranium
enrichment plant, installing and operating fewer gas
centrifuges than expected. Senior Vienna-based diplomats have
confirmed to ISIS that Iran may be either delaying
deliberately the pace of its work while diplomatic efforts are
underway, or is experiencing technical problems with its
centrifuge program. It continues to conduct small experiments,
and to operate a 164-machine cascade with uranium hexafluoride,
but it is not operating this cascade consistently over a
sustained period. ISIS has reported previously that Iran
appears to be operating the cascade at reduced efficiency and
output, yielding smaller quantities of low enriched uranium.
Iran has also failed to install as many cascades in the Natanz
pilot plant as expected. In April 2006, U.S. government and
IAEA officials expected Iran to have installed five cascades,
each containing 164 centrifuges, by August 2006 at Natanz's
pilot fuel enrichment plant (PFEP). (The PFEP is configured to
hold a total of six cascades, but one "slot" holds
five and ten machine cascades).
It now appears that Iran has not begun to operate the second
and third cascades at the pilot plant, although they may be
close to completion. There is no indication that Iran is close
to installing the fourth and fifth cascades. To demonstrate
proficiency in cascade operations, Iran must run these
cascades together for an extended period of time.
Iran informed the IAEA of plans to begin installation of the
first 3,000 centrifuges at Natanz's underground halls by the
last quarter of 2006. It now appears that Iran will also not
meet this deadline. It is possible that Iran's leadership has
deferred installation out of concern that the facility would
be a target of military strikes should diplomacy fail to
resolve the nuclear issue. It is also possible that Iran has
prepared undisclosed facilities for research and development
of uranium centrifuges and deployment of additional cascades,
although no evidence of such facilities currently operating
has emerged from IAEA inspections."
04/09/06
- Les néocons
violemment opposés à une force turque
au Liban
Turkey’s
Dangerous Lebanon Intentions
Daily Star (Lebanon), August 25, 2006
"...So, what happens if Turkish peacekeepers are deployed
to Lebanon? Clearly, the Turkish military is as secular as
ever. As its excellent track record in peacekeeping operations
indicates (Turkey is the only country that has successfully
led the international force in Afghanistan twice, for
instance), the Turkish military would go to Lebanon to do a
good job. Yet, once there, the hands of the military could
well be tied by Islamists in Turkey. What would happen, for
instance, if the Lebanese conflict reignited and Islamists
took to the streets of Istanbul demanding that the Turkish
military protect Hizbullah and Muslims? The Turkish military
would be hard pressed to refuse such a demand, as doing so
would cause it to lose credibility at home.
Turkish peacekeepers in Lebanon could make Turkey a partner in
regional politics on the side of Hizbullah, Syria and Iran. A
sign of this development came on August 22 in Damascus, when
visiting Turkish Foreign Minister Abdullah Gul received a
green light from the Syrian regime to send peacekeepers to
Lebanon. It is an ominous sign that so far Syria has approved
only the deployment of Turkish soldiers to Lebanon..."
04/09/06
- Les guerres
pour l'eau n'auront pas lieu
"Water
Wars" a Myth, Say Experts
IPS 25/08/06
"The world's future wars will be fought not over oil but
water: an ominous prediction made by the U.S. Central
Intelligence Agency (CIA), the British ministry of defence and
even by some officials of the World Bank.
But experts and academics meeting at an international
conference on water management in the Swedish capital are
dismissing this prediction as unrealistic, far-fetched and
nonsensical.
"Water wars make good newspaper headlines but cooperation
(agreements) don't," says Arunabha Ghosh, co-author of
the upcoming Human Development Report 2006 themed on water
management. The annual report, commissioned by the U.N.
Development Programme (UNDP), is to be released in December.
In reality, Ghosh told the meeting in Stockholm, there are
plenty of bilateral, multilateral and trans-boundary
agreements for water-sharing -- all or most of which do not
make good newspaper copy.
Asked about water wars, Prof. Asit K. Biswas of the
Mexico-based Third World Centre for Water Management, told IPS:
"This is absolute nonsense because this is not going to
happen -- at least not during the next 100 years."
He said the world is not facing a water crisis because of
physical water scarcities. "This is baloney," he
said.
"What it is facing is a crisis of bad water
management," argued Biswas, who was awarded the 2006
international Stockholm Water Prize for "outstanding
achievements" in his field. The presentation ceremony
took place in Stockholm Thursday..."
04/09/06
- Pétrole,
politiques étrangères et affrontements
sino-US
How
Oil Fuels Sino-U.S. Fires
BusinessWeek, September 4, 2006
"The emergence of China over the past decade as a major
importer of oil has catapulted energy toward the top of the
list of issues -- up there with trade and Taiwan -- that are
major sources of friction in Sino-American relations. China's
rapidly rising demand for energy is stoking anxiety in
Washington that there is not enough oil in the world to
satisfy the appetites both of America's 300 million
gas-guzzling citizens and of 1.3 billion Chinese. In turn,
America's unease has raised concerns in Beijing that the U.S.
might deny China access to the oil it needs for continued
economic growth.
Much has been made over this looming fight. Yet the real
conflict brewing between the two powers isn't because of
direct competition for physical barrels of crude, but rather
because oil is inextricably linked to other foreign policy
issues on which Beijing and Washington don't see eye to eye..."
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