16/10/06 - Les Etats-Unis s'autorisent la torture

Military Commissions Act of 2006


16/10/06 - 655.000 morts en Irak (?) et la psychologie de George W. Bush

Understanding W The Man
UPI 13/10/06

"W. had his own supermarket check-out moment this week, only this variety of eerie, presidential dysfunction and detachment comes at a considerable (and still-mounting) cost in blood and treasure. The perplexing President Bush -- with his dyed-in-the-wool, patrician, East-Coast rearing; Philips Andover, Yale, Harvard-schooling yet Texan-talkin', Evangelical persona -- has offered up the most revealing statement of his presidency.

The statement reflects a philosophical basis all the president's own for his confounding and extraordinarily onerous stay-the-course policy in Iraq. This unscripted glimpse at W., in an age of thoroughly orchestrated public appearances, illustrates the basis for the president's extraordinary cognitive dissonance on Iraq, such as his unceasing invocations of freedom -- when freedom remains so thoroughly beside the point in the sectarian-torn, Iraqi reality. The president's statement represents much more than a gaffe or syntax error, it reflects our president, the man, and, despite a certain pathetic quality, it is of enormous consequence.

As has been reported broadly, the president, when asked by Suzanne Malveaux at a press conference about the report citing over 600,000 fatalities in connection to the Iraq War, summarily rejected the findings, claiming it had been thoroughly discredited. Then came the utterance:

"I do know that a lot of innocent people have died and it troubles me and grieves me and I applaud the Iraqis for their courage in the face of violence. I am, you know, amazed that this is a society which so wants to be free that they're willing to...you know, that there's a level of violence that they tolerate. And it's now time for the Iraqi government to work hard to bring security in neighborhoods so people can feel-you know-at peace."

Any attempt to diagram the absurdity and significance of this statement risks coming up short. Here, at any rate, is an earnest attempt at it.

The president, in referring to a war he launched, is marveling at the Iraqi society's willingness to tolerate the violence he has in effect brought to their country -- willingness and tolerate of course being the operative words. Perhaps he should next wonder why they don't ask for cake. The breadth of his misunderstanding and naivety is simply astounding..."

"...Regardless of the philosophical origins of W.'s comment, it clearly signals the hermetic closure of the president's mind and the potential for the most childish, erroneous of ideas to germinate there. It also demonstrates the likelihood of going from very, very bad to worse in Iraq -- and beyond."


Lire, Read :

Study Claims Iraq's 'Excess' Death Toll Has Reached 655,000
Washington Post 11/10/06

Mortality after the 2003 invasion of Iraq: a cross-sectional cluster sample survey
Gilbert Burnham, Riyadh Lafta, Shannon Doocy, Les Roberts
Johns Hopkins University's Bloomberg School of Public Health
The Lancet 11/10/06


16/10/06 - Jim Baker pour sauver George W. Bush ?

Jim Baker, Savior?
by Jim Lobe IPS 11/10/06

"For the many, many foreign policy experts who have reached an advanced state of despair over the ever-plunging image and influence of the United States after nearly six years of the presidency of George W. Bush, the name James Baker III has an almost talismanic quality.

"Maybe if he [Bush] asks Baker to…" has become an increasingly common – and hopeful – preamble among the policy elite to sentences about whatever crisis is dominating the news that week, be it Iraq, Iran, Syria, and the Middle East generally, or, most recently, North Korea.

The assumption behind such musings is always that the former secretary of state – who, unlike other top members of the administration of President George H. W. Bush, notably former national security adviser Gen. Brent Scowcroft, has been very careful not to publicly criticize the younger Bush – is virtually the only person with the stature and diplomatic finesse to rescue crisis situations that have only gone from bad to worse – if, that is, the White House asks him to do so..."

"...The fact that some hard-line neoconservatives close to Vice President Dick Cheney see in Baker's sudden prominence a harbinger of "active appeasement" by the administration of U.S. foes in the Middle East suggests that the speculation may be more than mere wishful thinking.

Indeed, Baker these days is being put forward as a kind of Messiah whose pragmatic and classically "realist" approach to foreign policy offers the only available antidote to the grim Manichaeism of the administration's hawks, led by the presumed Antichrist, Vice President Dick Cheney. Despite having lost his dominant influence over policymaking in the last two years or so, Cheney retains enough clout with the president to effectively stymie efforts by Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice to pursue a more flexible diplomacy, especially in regard to perceived U.S. foes..."

"...Baker's new prominence is a result of his selection last spring to serve as co-chairman, along with former Democratic Rep. Lee Hamilton, of a bipartisan, congressionally-appointed Iraq Study Group, which plans to submit specific policy recommendations to Congress some time between the November midterm elections and next spring..."

"...In his ABC interview, for example, he said he expected the ISG to conclude that "stay[ing] the course" in Iraq, as advocated by Bush, was not a viable option and urged that Washington enter into direct talks with North Korea (although, in the wake of Monday's test, he has backed off that position), Syria, and Iran..."

"...But the fact that Baker has felt increasingly free to make public remarks that are at least implicitly critical of the administration's policies, particularly its refusal to engage directly with its "enemies," suggests a certain confidence in his position.

In a front-page article about the ISG Monday, the New York Times reported that Baker "has been talking to President Bush and his national security adviser, Stephen J. Hadley, on a regular basis."

"Baker is no fool," wrote hard-line neoconservative Michael Ledeen, who suggested that Baker's maneuvering is part of a State Department scheme to "engage" the Iranians, in particular. "He would not be making such statements … unless he were confident of consensus…." ..."


Lire, Read :

Panel to Seek Change on Iraq
LATimes 16/10/06

"A commission backed by Bush has agreed that 'stay the course' is not working, its leader says. A phased withdrawal is one option on the table.

A commission backed by President Bush that is exploring U.S. options in Iraq intends to propose significant changes in the administration's strategy by early next year, members say.

Two options under consideration would represent reversals of U.S. policy: withdrawing American troops in phases, and bringing neighboring Iran and Syria into a joint effort to stop the fighting.

While it weighs alternatives, the 10-member commission headed by former Secretary of State James A. Baker III has agreed on one principle.

"It's not going to be 'stay the course,' " one participant said. "The bottom line is, [current U.S. policy] isn't working…. There's got to be another way."

If the panel recommends overhauling Bush's approach to Iraq, it could give a boost not only to critics of current policy but also to officials in the administration who have argued for broad changes.

"There'll probably be some things in our report that the administration might not like," Baker said in a television interview last week.

It's unclear how willing Bush is to change his strategy, which focuses on improving security in Baghdad, training Iraqi security forces and pressing the Iraqi government to forge a political agreement among warring factions.

Progress on all those fronts has been slow, and Bush last week said he was open to ideas.

"My attitude is: Don't do what you're doing if it's not working — change," Bush said at a news conference.

When the panel was formed in March, some administration officials hoped it would produce a bipartisan endorsement of existing policy. But as sectarian violence in Iraq has worsened, more Republicans in Congress — and privately some administration officials — have become receptive to alternatives.

The Baker panel, called the Iraq Study Group, was formed in response to a proposal by members of Congress. Nevertheless, Baker sought — and won — Bush's endorsement.

Other members include former Rep. Lee H. Hamilton (D-Ind.), who also served as co-chairman of the commission investigating the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks; retired Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O'Connor; former Rep. Leon E. Panetta, a California Democrat who was President Clinton's chief of staff; and former CIA Director Robert M. Gates.

In its most recent closed-door meetings, the commission focused on two options drafted by experts outside the government.

One, titled "Stability First," calls for continuing to try to stabilize Baghdad, boosting efforts to entice insurgents into politics, and bringing Iran and Syria into plans to end the fighting.

The other, called "Redeploy and Contain," goes further. It calls for a gradual, phased withdrawal of American troops to bases outside Iraq where they would be available for strikes against terrorist organizations anywhere in the region.

The experts also prepared an option called "Stay the Course, Redefine the Mission," and an alternative urging a quick U.S. withdrawal, but the panel appeared less interested in those plans, participants said.

The options were first reported last week by the New York Sun.

Baker and other commission members refused to confirm the substance of the options and emphasized that the panel had made no decisions. But Baker signaled the thrust of the panel's deliberations in several television interviews last week.

"Our commission believes that there are alternatives between the stated alternatives, the ones that are out there in the political debate of 'stay the course' and 'cut and run,' " Baker said.

The former secretary of State, who was a longtime aide to former President George H.W. Bush, also said he favored reaching out to Iran and Syria."


16/10/06 - Des démocrates au royaume des néocons !

A New Kind of Neocon?
Leon Hadar, Right Web October 10, 2006

"In late September, the National Interest convened a meeting to consider "What a Post-Bush Foreign Policy Might Look Like." Gvosdev invited two foreign policy experts, one a Republican and one a Democrat, to predict how an administration of, say, Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) or Sen. Hillary Clinton (D-NY) would change U.S. global strategy, and in particular, whether they would reverse current policies. The conventional wisdom in Washington is that a Republican president like McCain might embrace a "Bush lite" approach (that's the best-case scenario—some say a Republican super-hawk would try to "out-neoconize" Bush), and a Democrat like Senator Clinton would adopt more sensible and internationalist diplomacy, à la Bill Clinton..."

"...But at the same time as realists and conservatives in the Republican Party are hoping to challenge the dominance of the neoconservatives over their party's foreign policy, many leading Democratic activists and liberal intellectuals seem to be calling on their party to embrace an even more "pure" or radical version of the neoconservative ideology..."

"...many hawkish liberal intellectuals and policy analysts who have ties to the Democratic leadership and are affiliated with newspapers and magazines such as the New York Times, Washington Post, New Republic, and the New Yorker and with think tanks like the Brookings Institution and the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, have acquiesced to Bush's foreign policy agenda (see "Bush's Useful Idiots: Tony Judt on the Strange Death of Liberal America," London Review of Books, September 21, 2006). Not unlike Marshall, they seem to be promoting the idea that the Democrats need to adopt the ambitious neoconservative creed while trying to "improve" it by making it more marketable and workable. They seem to suggest that the neoconservative doctrine was fine—it's just that the Republicans lacked the talent and the imagination to turn it into a success..."


Lire également, Read also :

First Date: Progressives And Realists Hold Hands
Dr. Strauss, Stop The Spirit Of Zossen 14/10/06