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Nicolas Sarkozy veut diriger la zone euro jusqu’en 2010
LE MONDE | 22.10.08 | 10h26
Strasbourg, Paris, Bruxelles

D’une pierre deux coups. Nicolas Sarkozy veut profiter de la crise financière pour imposer sa vision économique de l’Europe et continuer à présider l’Union européenne (UE) au niveau de la zone euro, au moins pour une année supplémentaire. Le président français a amorcé cette offensive au Parlement européen, mardi 21 octobre. Elle a été confirmée au Monde par plusieurs conseillers de l’Elysée.

L’ambition de M. Sarkozy part d’un diagnostic partagé : les crises géorgienne et financière ont montré que l’Europe avait besoin d’une présidence forte pour exister : faute de quoi, il aurait été impossible de négocier avec Moscou sur la crise géorgienne ou de concocter un plan européen de sauvetage des banques. Le traité de Lisbonne n’étant pas entré en vigueur à cause du non irlandais, l’Europe ne disposera pas, comme prévu, d’un président stable du Conseil, élu pour deux ans et demi. L’Union va continuer d’être dirigée au hasard des présidences semestrielles. Le 1er janvier 2009, elle se retrouvera dans les mains des eurosceptiques tchèques Vaclav Klaus et Mirek Topolanek, dans un pays en pleine crise gouvernementale, puis des Suédois, hors de l’euro.

Pour aggraver le tout, la Commission sera en fin de mandat, avant les élections européennes de juin 2009. Les circonstances seront peu propices à l’action. Le chef de l’Etat ne veut pas l’envisager : “Je ne laisserai pas revenir sur une Europe volontariste”, a-t-il insisté devant la presse.

M. Sarkozy a annoncé une feuille de route en décembre pour résoudre le problème de la présidence tournante. Faute de ratification irlandaise, il sera impossible d’agir au niveau des Vingt-Sept. Mais il est possible de contourner les Tchèques, puis les Suédois, en se réunissant au niveau des seize dirigeants de la zone euro, comme ce fut le cas dimanche 12 octobre, avant le Conseil européen.

M. Sarkozy a esquissé sa proposition devant le Parlement européen en expliquant que “la seule réunion des ministres des finances n’est pas à la hauteur de la gravité de la crise”. Les chefs d’Etat et de gouvernement étaient les seuls, selon lui, à pouvoir décider du plan de sauvetage des banques de 1 800 milliards d’euros, qui a constitué “un tournant dans cette crise”. La réunion périodique de cette instance constituerait un “gouvernement économique clairement identifié de la zone euro”.

RÉTICENCES DE L’ALLEMAGNE

L’Eurogroupe n’a aucune existence juridique et peut donc se doter d’une présidence sans traité institutionnel. La solution la plus audacieuse pour diriger ce forum consisterait à procéder à une élection. La seconde, plus simple, serait de décider que la France continue d’exercer la présidence au niveau de la zone euro, jusqu’à ce que la présidence de l’Union revienne à un pays ayant la monnaie unique, ce qui sera le cas le 1er janvier 2010, avec l’Espagne. Cette deuxième thèse semble naturelle au secrétaire d’Etat aux affaires européennes Jean-Pierre Jouyet, qui rappelle que les Belges ont dirigé un an l’Eurogroupe, en 2001, suppléant la présidence suédoise qui n’est pas dans l’euro. De même, les Grecs avaient remplacé en 2002 les Danois.

Le président ne serait autre que Nicolas Sarkozy, qui inviterait le premier ministre britannique, pour que la City, première place financière d’Europe, soit à bord. “Si l’on fait une élection, il faut un chef d’Etat leader et pas un chef d’Etat suiveur”, assure un conseiller de M. Sarkozy. Interrogé sur la candidature de Jean-Claude Juncker, premier ministre et ministre des finances luxembourgeois, qui préside l’Eurogroupe au niveau des ministres des finances, M. Sarkozy a répondu : “Bien sûr, pourquoi pas ? Il faudra qu’on l’élise.”

Derrière des mots aimables, le président français ne veut pas de M. Juncker, dont il estime qu’il a fait preuve de peu d’initiative dans la crise financière, et dont il a critiqué le pays pour son opacité financière. Outre l’Eurogroupe, M. Sarkozy voudrait utiliser un argument analogue pour présider l’Union pour la Méditerranée jusqu’à ce que vienne le tour de l’Espagne : Suède et République tchèque ne sont pas riverains de la Méditerranée.

M. Sarkozy n’a pas prévenu Angela Merkel avant son discours. Il attend sa réaction. Il faudrait que la chancelière accepte des réunions au plus haut niveau de la zone euro, alors que l’Allemagne a toujours été réticente à un gouvernement économique. Et qu’elle dise oui à une présidence Sarkozy.

Cécile Chambraud, Arnaud Leparmentier et Philippe Ricard
Pour Jean-Pierre Jouyet, “la question ne se pose pas”
La question de l’éventuelle présidence de la zone euro n’est pas à l’ordre du jour, a indiqué mercredi le secrétaire d’Etat français aux affaires européennes, Jean-Pierre Jouyet, en réaction aux informations du Monde. “La question ne se pose pas”, a déclaré M. Jouyet à l’AFP en marge de la session du Parlement européen à Strasbourg. Selon lui, les pays de la zone euro doivent d’abord décider s’ils veulent renouveler les réunions au sommet de la zone euro, au niveau des chefs d’Etat et de gouvernement, comme celle du 12 octobre à Paris. “S’il souhaitent ensuite donner une incarnation politique” à ce forum, sous la forme d’un président de la zone euro, “il leur appartiendra d’en décider”, a-t-il ajouté. – (Avec AFP.)

Nous sommes en Europe plus protégés qu’aux Etats-Unis où les gens sont, pour le coup, plus aux prises avec la réalité, ainsi une dégradation économique est plus rapidement perçue.

Personnellement, le grand changement aux Etats-Unis n’est pas vraiment le retour d’un sentiment de peur mais la naissance d’un sentiment de désespoir qui est le produit du sentiment de n’être plus en phase avec la réalité, de n’avoir plus raison, de n’être plus libre, plus souverain ou maître (de son propre destin comme celui des autres, ce qu’on appelle l’hégémonie), le désespoir c’est l’impossibilité d’agir.

Les Etats-Unis sont le pays, au moins en croyance, de la liberté, d’une promesse d’avenir meilleure, de la positivité, du progrès qui à leur tour reposent sur les puissances économique, technologique qui valident cette croyance, or, avec l’effondrement systémique que l’on vit, l’horizon s’obscurcit parce que les bases de la capacité d’action sont sapées, ainsi lorsque la légèreté est remplacée par la lourdeur, le nouveau par la routine,  le succès par l’échec, la liberté devient fatalité et le sentiment de désespoir se développe.

De plus avec un Président comme Bush qui au lieu de se sacrifier, qui permettrait de créer une rupture avec la l’échec, le fiasco vécus, continue d’affirmer avec un air béat qu’il avait raison, qu’il représente je ne sais quel Axe, il devient alors difficile de “s’en sortir” pour les Américains. Ce président qui ne cesse de parler de “liberté” a réussi ce tour de force d’enfermer la société américaine : c’est ce qui arrive lorsque la parole n’est pas en phase avec la réalité, et que vous chez Dedefensa dénoncez, je crois, comme “virtualisme”.

Cette situation est peut-être analogue avec celle de 1929 avec la “grande dépression”, que nous vivons actuellement avec beaucoup plus de force, car le système libérateur est devenu liberticide, ainsi un nouveau départ américain imposerait une mise en cause du système néolibéral qui a échoué, pour être remplacé par quoi ? En tout cas, Obama, qui dans sa campagne parle de “changement” ce qui est significatif, est plus apte à apporter des réponses, que McCain qui n’a pas compris la gravité, ni pris la mesure de la crise que vivent les Etats-Unis.

Ca serait pas si dramatique que cela..que le crépitement linguistique du maverick Mac cain soit élu à l’arraché d’une surprise de novembre   ou simplement par défaut de reconnaissance d’une   couleur de peau désavantageuse ( tant pis pour les fans d’obamania, la religion flottante et extasique étant une bulle médiatique de nos jours proprement déflationiste aussi prompte à crever le symbole fatigué ..  ..).. .Le peuple américain goutera scéance tenante les affres de la faillite systémique et les joies des impayés du systéme dollar même pas encore blanchit..Directos dans les entrailles noircis de l’ enfer , mac cain n’aura même pas le temps d’augmenter les taxes pour sauver les infrastructures US désarticulés…. Imaginez donc mac cain se rendant à Moscou suppliant Poutine et Medvedev de lui octroyer un plan de sauvetage de l’américanisme en déroute, in ‘live’..Ca vaudrait un ballon d’essai, de toute facon au point ou ils en sont autant que le scénario soit bien noir comme un taliban dormant dans la suite du FMI, faute de places à l’Hotel…....le décor est planté, mais les clients seront différents..et le déficit budgétaire serait moins sévérement garantit..,facon de parler le Russe sans métaphores guerriére excessives .. quoi!!

Bush to Host World Leaders at Nov. 15 Economic Summit
By Dan Eggen
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, October 23, 2008; A08
President Bush will host a summit on the global economic crisis in Washington on Nov. 15, kicking off landmark negotiations among world leaders on financial reforms less than two weeks after American voters go to the polls to choose a new president.
The timing and focus of the meeting highlight the severity of the economic crisis that will face Republican John McCain or Democrat Barack Obama after the Nov. 4 election and illustrate how rapidly the president-elect will need to engage on the issue.
Bush has agreed to host the meeting as the start of a series of ambitious summits aimed at overhauling the regulatory framework for global finance first put in place more than six decades ago at a similar summit at Bretton Woods, N.H. The gathering will include leaders of the Group of 20, an organization of major industrialized and developing nations, as well as central bankers and international finance officials.
In announcing the summit’s schedule yesterday, White House press secretary Dana Perino said the administration “will seek the input of the president-elect.” But she added that the administration thinks that the severity of the global crisis requires nations to move ahead before a new U.S. president is sworn in on Jan. 20.
“We think it’s important not to wait to have this meeting,” Perino said. “The time will be just about right to have it then, because a lot of the emergency measures that these countries have put forward are hopefully starting to have an impact” on credit markets.
Perino said a venue has not yet been selected. The summit will be preceded by a White House dinner on Nov. 14, she said.
Both campaigns praised the decision to hold the summit but offered few details regarding the candidates’ views on the key issues on the agenda.
Obama declined to say whether he would attend the meeting if elected, telling reporters in Richmond, Va., that “we still have one president at a time.”
“I don’t want to make commitments at this point in terms of our participation, my participation in something, before I’ve even won the election,” he said.
Obama, who last month called for a G-20 meeting on the crisis, cautioned that the issues facing world economies are not going to be resolved in a single summit. “I’ve got some ideas and my economic team has some ideas in terms of the direction that we should move,” he added. “But I don’t want to get too far ahead of myself on the details of that.”
Brian Rogers, a spokesman for the McCain campaign, said the Arizona senator is “pleased to see world leaders drawing together in this time of global economic crisis.”
“This summit offers an opportunity to share information, examine ideas and compare plans for responses to the financial stresses,” Rogers said. “It is an important opportunity to take urgent steps to recovery and prevention of similar crises in the future.”
The summit was also welcomed by Senate Majority Leader Harry M. Reid (D-Nev.), who called it a “positive, constructive step.” Reid and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) had urged Bush in a letter last month to meet with international leaders to discuss the financial crisis.
“I am hopeful that the meeting will not only address the immediate crisis facing the global economy, but will begin to make the international financial system stronger and more secure,” Reid said.
In a joint statement issued Saturday, Bush, French President Nicolas Sarkozy and European Commission President José Manuel Barroso had announced agreement on a series of summits to address the crisis and to discuss far-reaching reforms. The agenda is likely to include increasing market transparency, revising the rules that govern global investment flows, and improving oversight of big banks, ratings agencies and hedge funds.
But Sarkozy, British Prime Minister Gordon Brown and others have signaled a desire to go much further in regulating markets than Bush seems inclined to do. Brown said yesterday that he wants greater cross-border oversight of banks and other financial firms, while Sarkozy called for much stricter government supervision of financial markets.
Asked yesterday whether Bush agrees with such proposals, Perino said many countries will come to the summit with their own recommendations and ideas, including the United States. She said that it is “too early to say” what will emerge from the summit, and that leaders will discuss “how they can enhance their commitment to open, competitive economies, as well as trade and investment liberalization.”
The G-20—which says it represents about two-thirds of the world’s population—includes Argentina, Australia, Brazil, Canada, China, France, Germany, India, Indonesia, Italy, Japan, Mexico, Russia, Saudi Arabia, South Africa, South Korea, Turkey, the United Kingdom and the United States. The European Union, which is also a member, is represented by the rotating presidency of its council and the European Central Bank. The managing director of the International Monetary Fund, the president of the World Bank and other top officials of the two institutions also usually participate in G-20 meetings.
Staff writer William Branigin contributed to this report.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/10/22/AR2008102201448_pf.html
- October 23, 2008
Bush Calls 20 Nations to Summit on Markets
By SHERYL GAY STOLBERG and MARK LANDLER
WASHINGTON — President Bush will convene leaders of 20 nations in Washington on Nov. 15 for an emergency summit meeting to discuss the economic crisis, the White House said Wednesday. But the session, coming less than two weeks after the presidential election, could put Mr. Bush on a collision course with his successor.
The White House said Mr. Bush would “seek the input” of the president-elect, and both the Republican nominee, Senator John McCain, and the Democrat, Senator Barack Obama, praised Mr. Bush for convening the session. But neither man committed to attending, and the White House conceded it did not quite know how the meeting would play out.
The White House envisions the meeting as the first of a series of international meetings intended to lay the groundwork for a possible overhaul of the rules governing financial markets, in much the way that the conference at Bretton Woods, N.H., in 1944 remade the global financial system — spurred by the Great Depression and World War II.
Many economists say such a meeting is necessary and important, coming at a time when fears of a contagion among emerging market economies have multiplied. But from the American political perspective, the timing — at the tail end of a lame-duck administration — is terrible.
If history is any guide, Mr. Obama and Mr. McCain might prefer to steer clear. Historians say Mr. Bush’s summit meeting brings to mind similar efforts of another president facing tough economic times, Herbert Hoover. During the Great Depression, in the waning days of his administration, Hoover tried to draw the president-elect, Franklin D. Roosevelt, into policy prescriptions for the economy, but Roosevelt steadfastly resisted.
“Roosevelt simply did not want to get close to him or be identified with anything he would want to do, because he was terribly unpopular, and the same now exists with George W. Bush,” said the historian Robert Dallek. “In some ways, he’s trying to rescue his reputation, and the last thing Obama or even McCain are going to care about is saving George Bush’s reputation.”
The White House press secretary, Dana Perino, said Wednesday that it was “too early to say” if the incoming president would attend. “Let’s just let this election happen,” Ms. Perino said. “We don’t want to box the next president in.”
Mr. Obama, appearing in Richmond, Va., said the meeting provided “an opportunity to advance the kind of cooperation” that he himself had called for last month, when he advocated global coordination in addressing the credit crisis. Mr. McCain’s senior economics adviser, Douglas J. Holtz-Eakin, called the session “an important opportunity to take urgent steps toward recovery.”
One question, though, is how much Mr. Bush can accomplish with so little time left in office and foreign leaders already looking toward a successor who could easily undo any commitments he makes.
The conference will come just days before Mr. Bush’s last official foreign trip, to South America for a conference of leaders of Asian-Pacific nations. Ms. Perino said the White House thought it was important not to wait.
“We didn’t want the financial crisis to happen at all,” she said, adding, “but now that it’s happened, we can’t control the timing of it.”
Some economists said the meeting could have a calming effect on markets, if only by demonstrating that world leaders are willing to cooperate. “At best it does something; at worst it does no harm,” said Carmen M. Reinhart, a professor at the University of Maryland who is writing a book on financial crises.
But others are skeptical that a meeting pulled together on such a hurried basis could produce substantive results. They said that the Bretton Woods conference, which resulted in the creation of the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, was years in the planning.
“Things like this that produce real results for the world are planned years in advance,” said Edwin M. Truman, who was an assistant secretary of the Treasury under President Bill Clinton. “The notion that you’re going to have something come out of this in three months is probably naïve.”
Indeed, the meeting is being planned in such haste that Ms. Perino said the White House was not yet certain where it would be held. She said the goal was for the leaders to “agree on a common set of principles for reform” and then direct financial experts “to put meat on the bones when it comes to fleshing out the principles.”
Mr. Bush has been under intense pressure from his counterparts in Europe, notably President Nicolas Sarkozy of France, to hold a meeting of world economic powers. But the White House at first sounded resistant to the idea; administration officials have said Mr. Bush is concerned that adding new layers of regulation could stifle free markets and free trade.
On Saturday, Mr. Sarkozy and the president of the European Union, José Manuel Barroso, had dinner with Mr. Bush at Camp David and apparently brokered a deal. Although Mr. Sarkozy had suggested earlier that day that the meeting be held in New York, the White House wanted it in Washington, on Mr. Bush’s turf.
The president also insisted that the sessions include developing nations — a decision that experts said acknowledges the risk that such countries face, especially now that larger, more prosperous nations have poured billions into stabilizing their banks. The rescue measures adopted by Western countries, including the United States, actually heighten the risk for emerging markets, because banks in those countries are now less safe than those in the Western economies.
The talks come as nations like Hungary, Ukraine and Belarus are showing the same symptoms — flight of foreign capital, plummeting currencies and soaring inflation — that hit Iceland recently, capsizing its banking system and hobbling its economy.
All these countries are in talks with the International Monetary Fund for loans to stabilize their banks. With Western banks pulling back credit, the list of countries at risk of a financial crisis could grow to include several more in Central Europe and Latin America, economists say.
“You’ve got a lot of emerging markets who are going to go to this meeting and say ‘You’ve got to take this seriously,’ ” said Simon Johnson, a former chief economist of the International Monetary Fund.
With Europe and the United States both paying for costly bank bailouts, however, they have limited resources to help countries directly. That suggests a growing role for the fund, as well as for the World Bank. The White House has invited the heads of both institutions to the meeting.
The countries invited are drawn from the so-called G-20, a forum of rich and emerging nations that was convened in 1999 after the Asian economic crisis. Its members are: Argentina, Australia, Brazil, Canada, China, France, Germany, India, Indonesia, Italy, Japan, South Korea, Mexico, Russia, Saudi Arabia, South Africa, Turkey, Britain, the United States and the European Union.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/23/business/economy/23bush.html?_r=1&ref=world&oref=slogin

Un premier sommet pour réformer la finance mondiale
LEMONDE.FR avec AFP et Reuters | 22.10.08 | 16h48 •  Mis à jour le 22.10.08 | 17h25

Le premier sommet d’une série sur la crise financière se tiendra le 15 novembre près de Washington, avec la participation des dirigeants du G20, a annoncé, mercredi 22 octobre, la porte-parole de la Maison Blanche, Dana Perino. Un haut responsable de l’administration avait indiqué peu auparavant, sous couvert de l’anonymat, que ce premier sommet viserait à “discuter des causes de la crise financière”, “passer en revue les progrès faits” pour résoudre la crise, “développer des principes de réformes nécessaires pour faire en sorte que [la crise] ne se reproduise pas”, et “charger des groupes de travail de formuler des recommandations que les dirigeants envisageraient au cours d’un prochain sommet”.
Nicolas Sarkozy avait obtenu le week-end dernier à Camp David l’accord de principe de George Bush à l’organisation de cette rencontre aux Etats-Unis. Mais son envie de le voir se tenir à New-York même, “là où la crise a commencé”, n’a pas été entendue. “Il n’est pas sûr que cette symbolique séduise totalement les Américains”, explique un conseiller de Nicolas Sarkozy. Fixer la date de tenue du sommet posait également des problèmes car les emplois du temps des chefs d’Etat pour les prochaines semaines sont déjà saturés. Cette réunion ne pouvait pas avoir lieu avant les élections américaines du 4 novembre.
 
 

“DES DISCUSSIONS LOURDES DE SENS”
Si la date et le lieu ont enfin été fixés, la tenue de ce sommet reste un gros chantier. Outre le contenu, l’intitulé même du futur sommet est l’objet de discussions, souligne la présidence française. Nicolas Sarkozy propose que ce sommet jette les bases d’une “refondation” du capitalisme. Mais “il n’est pas sûr que [le président chinois] Hu Jintao signe en bas de page l’idée de refonder le capitalisme”, estime un de ses conseillers. Le président allemand du Parlement européen, Hans-Gert Pöttering, préfère parler d’”économie sociale de marché”. “On va avoir, même sur le plan du vocabulaire, des discussions lourdes de sens”, souligne le même conseiller.
Sans parler d’une “boîte à outils”, comme celle sur laquelle se sont mis d’accord les quinze pays de la zone euro, puis les vingt-sept de l’Union européenne, pour faire face à la crise, Paris souhaite que le futur sommet parvienne d’abord à un “diagnostic partagé” des causes de la crise et des réponses à y apporter. “Ce qu’on souhaite c’est d’abord identifier les causes de la crise financière”, explique l’Elysée. “Deuxièmement apporter des réponses à tous ces dysfonctionnements, corriger les erreurs qui ont été faites dans la gestion de la finance mondiale à travers tous les acteurs qui ont dérapé.” Les corrections souhaitées par Nicolas Sarkozy visent notamment à renforcer la surveillance des acteurs et la régulation des marchés financiers.

http://www.lemonde.fr/la-crise-financiere/article/2008/10/22/un-premier-sommet-pour-reformer-la-finance-mondiale_1109976_1101386.html#ens_id=1089411

A journey into Taliban-controlled Afghanistan

NIR ROSEN Posted Oct 30, 2008

http://www.rollingstone.com/news/story/23612315/how_we_lost_the_war_we_won

The highway that leads south out of Kabul, the capital of Afghanistan, passes through a craggy range of arid, sand-colored mountains with sharp, stony peaks. Poplar trees and green fields line the road. Nomadic Kuchi women draped in colorful scarves tend to camels as small boys herd sheep. The hillsides are dotted with cemeteries: rough-hewn tombstones tilting at haphazard angles, multicolored flags flying above them. There is nothing to indicate that the terrain we are about to enter is one of the world’s deadliest war zones. On the outskirts of the capital we are stopped at a routine checkpoint manned by the Afghan National Army. The wary soldiers single me out, suspicious of my foreign accent. My companions, two Afghan men named Shafiq and Ibrahim, convince the soldiers that I am only a journalist. Ibrahim, a thin man with a wispy beard tapered beneath his chin, comes across like an Afghan version of Bob Marley, easygoing and quick to smile. He jokes with the soldiers in Dari, the Farsi dialect spoken throughout Afghanistan, assuring them that everything is OK.

As we drive away, Ibrahim laughs. The soldiers, he explains, thought I was a suicide bomber. Ibrahim did not bother to tell them that he and Shafiq are midlevel Taliban commanders, escorting me deep into Ghazni, a province largely controlled by the spreading insurgency that now dominates much of the country.

Until recently, Ghazni, like much of central Afghanistan, was considered reasonably safe. But now the province, located 100 miles south of the capital, has fallen to the Taliban. Foreigners who venture to Ghazni often wind up kidnapped or killed. In defiance of the central government, the Taliban governor in the province issues separate ID cards and passports for the Taliban regime, the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan. Farmers increasingly turn to the Taliban, not the American-backed authorities, for adjudication of land disputes.

By the time we reach the town of Salar, only 50 miles south of Kabul, we have already passed five tractor-trailers from military convoys that have been destroyed by the Taliban. The highway, newly rebuilt courtesy of $250 million, most of it from U.S. taxpayers, is pocked by immense craters, most of them caused by roadside bombs planted by Taliban fighters. As in Iraq, these improvised explosive devices are a key to the battle against the American invaders and their allies in the Afghan security forces, part of a haphazard but lethal campaign against coalition troops and the long, snaking convoys that provide logistical support.

We drive by a tractor-trailer still smoldering from an attack the day before, and the charred, skeletal remains of a truck from an attack a month earlier. At a gas station, a crowd of Afghans has gathered. Smoke rises from the road several hundred yards ahead.

“Jang,” says Ibrahim, who is sitting in the front passenger seat next to Shafiq. “War. The Americans are fighting the Taliban.”

Shafiq and Ibrahim use their cellphones to call their friends in the Taliban, hoping to find out what is going on. Suddenly, the chatter of machine-gun fire erupts, followed by the thud of mortar fire and several loud explosions that shake the car. I flinch and duck in the back seat, cursing as Shafiq and Ibrahim laugh at me.
“Tawakkal al Allah,” Shafiq lectures me. “Depend on God.”

This highway ? the only one in all Afghanistan ? was touted as a showpiece by the Bush administration after it was rebuilt. It provides the only viable route between the two main American bases, Bagram to the north and Kandahar to the south. Now coalition forces travel along it at their own risk. In June, the Taliban attacked a supply convoy of 54 trucks passing through Salar, destroying 51 of them and seizing three escort vehicles. In early September, not far from here, another convoy was attacked and 29 trucks were destroyed. On August 13th, a few days before I pass through Salar, the Taliban staged an unsuccessful assassination attempt on the U.S.-backed governor of Ghazni, wounding two of his guards.

As we wait at the gas station, Shafiq and Ibrahim display none of the noisy indignation that Americans would exhibit over a comparable traffic jam. To them, a military battle is a routine inconvenience, part of life on the road. Taking advantage of the break, they buy a syrupy, Taiwanese version of Red Bull called Energy at a small shop next door. At one point, two green armored personnel carriers from NATO zip by, racing toward Kabul. Shafiq and Ibrahim laugh: It looks like the coalition forces are fleeing the battle.

“Bulgarians,” Shafiq says, shaking his head in amusement.

After an hour, the fighting ends, and we get back in the car. A few minutes later, we pass the broken remains of a British supply convoy. Dozens of trucks ? some smoldering, others still ablaze ? line the side of the road, which is strewn with huge chunks of blasted asphalt. The trucks carried drinks for the Americans, Ibrahim tells me as we drive past. Hundreds of plastic water bottles with white labels spill out of the trucks, littering the highway.

Farther down the road, American armored vehicles block our path. Smoke pours from the road behind them. Warned by other drivers that the Americans are shooting at approaching cars, Shafiq slowly maneuvers to the front of the line and stops. When the Americans finally move, we all follow cautiously, like a nervous herd. We drive by yet more burning trucks. Ibrahim points to three destroyed vehicles, the remains of an attack four days earlier.

A few miles later, at a lonely desert checkpoint manned by the Afghan army, several soldiers with AK-47s make small talk with Shafiq and Ibrahim, asking them about the battle before waving us through. As night falls, we pass a police station. We have reached Ghazni province.

“From now on, it’s all Taliban territory,” Ibrahim tells me. “The Americans and police don’t come here at night.”

Shafiq laughs. “The Russians were stronger than the Americans,” he says. “More fierce. We will put the Americans in their graves.”

It has been seven years since the United States invaded Afghanistan in the wake of September 11th. The military victory over the Taliban was swift, and the Bush administration soon turned its attention to rebuilding schools and roads and setting up a new government under President Hamid Karzai. By May 2003, only 18 months after the beginning of the war, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld all but declared victory in Afghanistan. “We are at a point where we clearly have moved from major combat activity to a period of stability and stabilization and reconstruction,” Rumsfeld announced during a visit to Kabul. The security situation in Afghanistan, in his view, was better than it had been for 25 years.
But even as Rumsfeld spoke, the Taliban were beginning their reconquest of Afghanistan. The Pentagon, already focused on invading Iraq, assumed that the Afghan militias it had bought with American money would be enough to secure the country. Instead, the militias proved far more interested in extorting bribes and seizing land than pursuing the hardened Taliban veterans who had taken refuge across the border in Pakistan. The parliamentary elections in 2005 returned power to the warlords who had terrorized the countryside before the Taliban imposed order. “The American intervention issued a blank check to these guys,” says a senior aid official in Kabul. “They threw money, weapons, vehicles at them. But the warlords never abandoned their bad habits ? they’re abusing people and filling their pockets.

By contrast, aid for rebuilding schools and clinics has been paltry. In the critical first two years after the invasion, international assistance amounted to only $57 per citizen ? compared with $679 in Bosnia. As U.S. contractors botched reconstruction jobs and fed corruption, little of the money intended to rebuild Afghanistan reached those in need. Even worse, the sudden infusion of international aid drove up real estate and food prices, increasing poverty and fueling widespread resentment.

The government of Pakistan, seeking to retain influence over what it views as its back yard, began helping the Taliban regroup. With the Bush administration focused on the war in Iraq, money poured into Afghanistan from Al Qaeda and other Islamic extremists, who were eager to maintain a second front against the American invaders. The Taliban ? once an isolated and impoverished group of religious students who knew little about the rest of the world and cared only about liberating their country from oppressive warlords ? are now among the best-armed and most experienced insurgents in the world, linked to a global movement of jihadists that stretches from Pakistan and Iraq to Chechnya and the Philippines.

The numbers tell the story. Attacks on coalition and Afghan forces are up 44 percent since last year, the highest level since the war began. By October, 135 American troops had been killed in Afghanistan this year ? already surpassing the total of 117 fatalities for all of 2007. The Taliban are also intensifying their attacks on aid workers: In a particularly brazen assault in August, a group of Taliban fighters opened fire on the car of a U.S. aid group, the International Rescue Committee, killing three Western women and their Afghan driver on the main road to Kabul.

The Bush administration, belatedly aware that it was losing Afghanistan, responded to the violence as it did in Iraq: by calling for more troops. Speaking at the National Defense University on September 9th, the president announced a “quiet surge” of U.S. troops in Afghanistan, saying additional forces are necessary to stabilize “Afghanistan’s young democracy.” But the very next day, testifying before the House Armed Services Committee, Adm. Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, offered a sharply different assessment. His prepared testimony, approved by the secretary of defense and the White House, read, “I am convinced we can win the war in Afghanistan.” But when Mullen sat down before Congress, he deviated from his prepared statement. “I am not convinced we are winning it in Afghanistan,” he testified bluntly.

In early October, the president’s plan for a surge was once again contradicted by his top advisers. American intelligence agencies drafting a classified report on the war warned that Afghanistan is in a “downward spiral” fueled by worsening violence and rampant corruption. Defense Secretary Robert Gates also admitted to Congress that the Pentagon is stretched so thin in Iraq, it will be unable to meet even a modest request for 10,000 more troops in Afghanistan until next spring at the earliest.
But those closest to the chaos in Afghanistan say that throwing more soldiers into combat won’t help. “More troops are not the answer,” a senior United Nations official in Kabul tells me. “You will not make more babies by having many guys screw the same woman.”

It is a point echoed in dozens of off-the-record interviews I conducted in Kabul with leading Western diplomats, security experts, former mujahedeen and Taliban commanders, and senior officials with the U.N. and prominent aid organizations. All agree that the situation is, in the words of one official, “incredibly bleak.” Using suicide bombers and other tactics imported from Iraq, the Taliban have cut Kabul off from the rest of the country and established themselves as the only law in many rural villages. “People don’t want the Taliban back, but they’re afraid to back the government,” says one top diplomat. “They know the Taliban will ride into the village and behead anybody who has made a deal with the coalition.”

According to the diplomat, military solutions are simply no longer viable. “The analysis of our intelligence people is that things are getting worse,” he says. “CIA analysts are extremely gloomy and worried. You have an extremely weak president in Afghanistan, a corrupt and ineffective ministry of the interior, an army with no command or control, and a dysfunctional international alliance.”

As one top official with a Western aid organization put it, “We’re simply not up to the task of success in Afghanistan. I’m increasingly unsure about a way forward ? except that we should start preparing our exit strategy.”

To travel with the Taliban and see firsthand how they operate, I contacted a well-connected Afghan friend in Kabul and asked him to make the introductions. He knew many groups of fighters in Afghanistan, but said he would only trust my security if those I accompanied knew that they and their families would be killed if anything happened to me. Through a respected dignitary, I was connected with Mullah Ibrahim, who commands 500 men in the Dih Yak district of Ghazni. We met at my friend’s office in Kabul on a hot, sunny afternoon. Midlevel Taliban leaders like Ibrahim move freely about the capital, like any other Afghan: U.S. forces lack the intelligence and manpower to identify enemy commanders, let alone apprehend them. (To protect Ibrahim’s identity, I agreed to change his name.)

Now in his 40s, Ibrahim has been fighting with the Taliban since the 1990s. He walks with a pronounced limp: He lost his right leg below the knee in the country’s civil war, and he had undergone surgery only the week before to repair nerve damage he suffered in a recent firefight. At first he told me his wounds were from an American bullet, but I later learned he had been injured in a clash with a rival Taliban commander.

After our meeting, Ibrahim promised to contact the Taliban minister of defense and request approval for my trip. As I waited for word, I went to a market in Kabul and bought several sets of salwar kameez, the traditional tunic and baggy pants worn by Afghan men. I had grown my beard longer to pass as an Afghan, and before leaving New York I had supplemented my Arabic and basic Farsi with a week of Berlitz classes in Pashtu, the language spoken by the ethnic group that dominates the Taliban. Pashtu is not exactly in high demand, and the book Berlitz gave me was clearly designed for military purposes. It contained a list of military ranks, including “General of the Air Force,” and offered a helpful list of weapons, including “land mines” and “bullets.” It also provided the Pashtu translation for a host of important phrases: Show me your ID card. Let the vehicle pass. You are a prisoner. Hands up. Surrender. If I wanted to arrest an Afghan, I was now prepared. The book did not include the phrase I needed most: Ze talibano milmayam. “I am a guest of the Taliban.”
On a Saturday afternoon, Ibrahim picks me up in a white Toyota Corolla, its dashboard covered in fake gray fur. His friend Shafiq is behind the wheel, wearing a cap embroidered with rhinestones. Afghan culture places a premium on courtesy, and Shafiq comes across as unfailingly polite. At one point, almost casually, he mentions that he has personally executed some 200 spies, usually by beheading them. “First I warn people to stop,” he says, emphasizing his fair-mindedness. “If they continue, I kill them.”

Shafiq, who fought the Soviets with the mujahedeen, now commands Taliban fighters in the Andar district of Ghazni. “Andar is a very bad place,” an intelligence officer in Kabul tells me. “The Taliban show a lot of confidence and freedom of movement there.” While coalition forces have focused on driving the insurgents from the south, they failed to maintain a buffer in central regions like Ghazni, where the Taliban now routinely pull people off buses and execute them. “They have that level of control right on Kabul’s front door,” the officer adds. “Environments regarded as extreme two years ago are much worse now. There has been a staggering intensification.”

As we head south, Shafiq tells me that fighters from Saudi Arabia, Pakistan and Uzbekistan have come through the Andar district. Most are suicide bombers, but some fight alongside the Taliban. He is impressed with their skill, but like many Taliban, he doesn’t care for their politics. “Pakistan and Iran are not friends of Afghanistan,” Shafiq says dismissively. “They don’t want peace in Afghanistan ? they want to take Afghanistan.” Despite their extremely conservative views on religion, most Taliban are fundamentally nationalist and Afghan-centric. They accept the support of Al Qaeda, but that doesn’t mean they approve of its tactics. “Suicide attacks are not good because they kill Muslims,” Shafiq says.

In the darkness, we roll into the village of Nughi. We no longer have cellphone reception; the Taliban shut down the phone towers after sunset, when they stop for the night, to prevent U.S. surveillance from pinpointing their position. It is the holiday of Shaab eh Barat, when Muslims believe God determines a person’s destiny for the coming year. Young boys from the village gather to swing balls of fire attached to wires. Like orange stars, hundreds of fiery circles glow far into the distance. The practice is haram ? one of many traditions banned by the Taliban, who consider it forbidden under Islam. The fact that it is being tolerated is the first indication I have that the Taliban are not as doctrinaire as they were during their seven years of rule.

Shafiq maneuvers the car on the bumpy dirt road between mud houses. After a few stops in the village we are led to a house where a group of young Taliban fighters emerges. Several of them are carrying weapons. We greet the traditional way, each man placing his right hand on the other’s heart, leaning in but not fully embracing, inquiring about the other’s health and family. Ibrahim, who had promised to protect me on the trip, decides to go home, leaving Shafiq to guide me the rest of the way.

With the moon lighting our path, Shafiq and I follow the Taliban on foot to another house, entering through a low door into a guest room with a red carpet on the floor and wooden beams on the ceiling.

A dim bulb barely illuminates the room. A PKM belt-fed machine gun and a rocket-propelled grenade launcher lean against a wall, next to several rockets. We are joined by Mullah Yusuf, Ibrahim’s nephew, who serves as a senior commander in Andar.
Yusuf has dark reddish skin and a handsome face. He wears a black turban with thin gold stripes and carries an AK-47. A boy brings a pitcher and basin and we rinse our hands. We drink green tea and eat a soup of mushy bread called shurwa with our hands, followed by meat and grapes.

Yusuf became a commander last year, when the Americans killed his superior officer. He sleeps in a different house every night to avoid detection. Only 30 years old, he has big ears and an almost elfin air; the ringtone on his cellphone is a bells-and-cymbals version of The Sorcerer’s Apprentice theme. A year and a half ago, Yusuf was injured in his thigh by a U.S. helicopter strike, and now walks with a limp. He joined the Taliban in 2003 after studying at a religious school in North Waziristan, the border region of Pakistan where many Afghan refugees live. He seems less motivated by religious ideals than by defending his homeland: He took up jihad, he tells me, because foreigners have come to Afghanistan and are fighting Afghans and poor people.

“The Americans are not good,” he says. “They go into houses and put people in jail. Fifteen days ago the Americans bombed here and killed a civilian.”

The U.S. campaign in Afghanistan has not been helped by its rash of misguided bombings. This year, according to the United Nations, 1,445 Afghan civilians were killed by coalition forces through August ? two-thirds of them in airstrikes. On July 6th, a bombing raid killed 47 members of a wedding party ? including 39 women and children ? near the village of Kacu. On August 22nd, more than 90 civilians ? again mostly women and children ? were killed in an airstrike in Azizabad.

Yusuf makes it clear that it is only the Americans he has a problem with. Once the foreigners leave, he insists, the Taliban will negotiate peace with the Afghan army and police: “They are brothers, Muslims.” What’s more, he says, girls will be allowed to go to school, and women will be allowed to work. It is a stance I will hear echoed by many Taliban leaders. In recent years, recognizing that their harsher strictures had alienated the population, the Taliban have grown more tolerant. To improve their operations, they have even been forced to adopt technologies they once banned: computers, television, films, the Internet.

After we finish eating, we walk to a mud shed. Shafiq opens its wooden doors to reveal another white Toyota Corolla. The men load the RPG launcher and four rockets into the car, along with the PKM machine gun. We drive through the moonlit desert on dirt paths to the village of Kharkhasha, where Shafiq lives. On the way, Shafiq pops in a cassette of Taliban chants. They are in Pashtu and without instrumentation, which is forbidden by the Taliban.

Arriving at Shafiq’s house, we enter the guest room in darkness and sit on thin mattresses. A small gas lamp is brought out, as well as grapes and green tea. Shafiq says he fought the Soviets in the 1980s and spent five years in jail. But following the Soviet withdrawal, as the mujahedeen turned on one another, Shafiq felt they had become robbers. He joined the Taliban in 1994, he says, because they wanted peace and Islam.

Shafiq has met Osama bin Laden twice ? once before the Taliban took over, and once during the Taliban reign. He was impressed by bin Laden’s knowledge of Pashtu. He has also met Mullah Muhammed Omar, the one-eyed cleric who calls himself the “commander of the faithful.” Omar, who served as leader of the Taliban government, is now in hiding across the border in Pakistan, where he rebuilt the Taliban with the help and protection of Pakistani intelligence. Shafiq hopes that Omar will return to lead the country, but other Taliban leaders no longer view him as the only option. The shift is significant ? a sign that the Taliban are not fighting merely to restore the hard-line government they had before but are prepared to move forward with a greater degree of flexibility and pragmatism than they have shown in the past.
The next morning, we get back into the Corolla, loading the PKM, the RPG launcher and four rockets into the trunk. Shafiq and the machine gun are in the front passenger seat. Yusuf drives, his AK-47 beside him. Another Taliban fighter rides a Honda motorcycle alongside us, an AK-47 strapped to his shoulder. They have promised to take me to see the Taliban in action: going out on patrols, conducting attacks, adjudicating disputes and providing security against bandits and police. As we head deeper into the province, the land becomes increasingly flat and arid. Everything is the color of sand. Even the dilapidated mud homes, bleached almost white by the sun, look like sand castles after the first wave has hit them.

Yusuf points to a police checkpoint. The police know him, he says, but do nothing to stop him. “Every night I go on patrol, and they don’t fight me,” he says. “They don’t have guns, and they are afraid.”

The police, in fact, often defect to the Taliban. Shafiq recently bought two jeeps from the police, who later told the Interior Ministry that the vehicles were destroyed in an attack. “The police are highly corrupt,” a senior U.N. official in Kabul tells me. “They are at the center of the collapse of the Karzai government ? their corruption makes people support the Taliban.” The cops have even taken to robbing U.S. contractors. “The police will raid foreign companies and just steal everything ? iPods, money, weapons, radios,” says an intelligence officer. “People might hate the Taliban, but they hate the government just as much. At least the Taliban have rules. This government, they’re just parasites fucking with you.”

In the village of Khodzai, we visit a commander at a mosque where eight men and two boys sit on the floor, drinking tea. When they aren’t attacking checkpoints or ambushing convoys, the Taliban spend most of their time praying or listening to religious lectures. The men ambushed the Afghan army two days earlier in a nearby village, killing 20 Afghan soldiers. “The Americans do not come here,” their commander says proudly. “We control this area. The Taliban is the government here.”

Outside, in a sunny courtyard, the men get ready to go on patrol, checking their ammunition and slinging their AK-47s over their shoulders. Suddenly, a coalition military helicopter swoops low overhead, nearly coming to a hover above us. Throughout the war, the U.S. has compensated for its lack of troops by relying on aerial shows of force: It’s possible to go for days in Ghazni without seeing a single coalition soldier. I clench my fists in terror, waiting for the helicopter to fire at us, but the men ignore it and laugh at me. One tells me he fired an RPG at a helicopter yesterday, and will fire a rocket at this one if it attacks us. My fear may be comic, but it’s not misplaced: A month after I leave, an airstrike in Andar will kill seven suspected Taliban fighters.

To my relief, the helicopter flies off. The men leave on their motorcycles to patrol the countryside. As the Taliban have attempted to counter the Americans by adopting the tactics of Iraqi insurgents, they have become far more brutal than they were when they ruled Afghanistan. To sow insecurity, they routinely enter villages and bypass traditional tribal mechanisms, waging a harsh campaign of social terror.

“They’re killing more and more tribal elders,” one intelligence officer tells me. “We can’t expect communities to show solidarity with the government when we can’t provide for their security ? it’s ridiculous.”

As we leave the mosque, Shafiq tells me of the trials that the Taliban frequently hold to prosecute collaborators. The suspects are given a hearing by a qazi, or judge, who orders those convicted to be beheaded. As he drives, Shafiq plays more Taliban songs about brave boys going to fight.

As the Taliban insurgency spreads, it has fallen victim to the tribal rivalries and violent infighting that are endemic to Afghanistan, which is home to hundreds of distinct tribal groups. “The leadership is totally fragmented,” a senior U.N. official says. “There is a lot of criminality within the Taliban.” With the targeting of civilians now sanctioned by the Taliban, top commanders compete for prize catches, stopping cars in broad daylight and checking the cellphones of foreigners to determine if they are worthwhile captives. As we drive deeper into Ghazni, we are entering territory where such factionalization is now as lethal as the rocket launcher stuffed in the Corolla’s trunk.
In the middle of a sandstorm, we head to a local shop, pulling up with the PKM in plain view and the Taliban chants blaring from the car’s speakers. The people in the shop greet Yusuf warmly. He buys shoulder straps for AK-47s. Then, as we’re passing through a nearby village, we are stopped by a bearded man on a motorcycle. An AK-47 is slung over his shoulder, his face partially concealed by a scarf.

He demands to know who I am. Shafiq tells him I am a guest. The man asks me if I am Pashtun. “Pukhtu Nayam,” I say, drawing on my Berlitz lessons. “I am not Pashtun.” He glares at me and rides off.

Arriving at another mosque, we find a dozen men inside. A large shoulder-fired missile is on the floor, an anti-armor weapon. Shafiq tells me we are waiting to meet the commander who will approve my trip.

This is news to me. I thought my trip had already been approved by the Taliban defense minister. Suddenly, as I am talking to one of the fighters, the angry man on the motorcycle bursts in holding a walkie-talkie. He barks at the fighter to stop talking to me until the men’s commander shows up. A judge, he says, will decide what will happen to me. Upon hearing the Pashtu word qazi, I start to panic. As Shafiq made clear earlier, a meeting with a judge could end with decapitation.

I am ordered to get into a car with the angry man and the other strangers, who will take me to the judge. To my alarm, Shafiq says he will join Yusuf, who is praying in the mosque, and catch up with us later. He seems to be washing his hands of me.

I have been held by militias in both Iraq and Lebanon, but in those situations I could speak the language and talk my way out of trouble. Now I am in one of the most desolate places I have ever seen, far from any help and unable to speak more than a few garbled words of Pashtu. Trying to contain my mounting sense of helplessness, I tell Shafiq that I am not leaving him ? I am his guest. Once I am out of his control, I will be at the mercy of men who kill almost as routinely as they pray. Brandishing their rifles, the men shout at me to get into their car.

Yusuf comes out and tells me to get into our Corolla. He won’t leave me, he says. He puts another man with an AK-47 in the car to guard me. As I wait, a standoff ensues. Frantic, I send text messages to my contacts back in Kabul to tell them I’m in trouble. In the tense silence, my guard’s cellphone abruptly goes off: The ringtone is machine-gun fire, accompanied by a song about the Taliban being born for martyrdom.

My mouth goes dry from fear; I feel as though I have lost my voice. My friend in Kabul who helped arrange the trip manages to get through to Shafiq. He tells him he should not leave me, that I am Shafiq’s responsibility and he will hold him personally responsible if anything happens to me.

We sit in the car for more than an hour, windows up. The sandstorm is still raging, and it’s impossible to see more than a few yards. Outside, men with guns flicker into view, only to vanish in the blinding haze. Finally, Shafiq tells me I can get out. The angry man and his companions depart, taking the rocket launcher with them. Thinking it is over, I put my hand on my heart as they leave, to indicate no ill will. Then Shafiq tells me there has been a change of plan. He has been ordered to escort me to visit a rival commander ? a man called Dr. Khalil ? who will determine what will happen to me.

I later learn that I have been caught in the midst of the bitter and often violent infighting that divides the Taliban. Ibrahim’s recent injury, it turns out, was the result of a clash between his forces and a group of foreign fighters under the command of Dr. Khalil. The foreigners wanted to close down a girls’ school, sparking a battle. Two Arabs and 11 Pakistanis commanded by Dr. Khalil had been killed by Ibrahim’s men.

As we leave to meet Dr. Khalil, the car jolts forward in the sandstorm, rocking back and forth on the stony path. I feel as though I am in a boat being tossed about by waves. Yusuf tells me not to worry ? if Dr. Khalil tries to take me, he will fight them. It is the only reassurance I have. Throughout all our time in Ghazni, we have seen no authority other than the Taliban. Even if American helicopters were to appear suddenly, that would hardly be a relief ? it would only be to target us in an airstrike.
I struggle to find a signal for my phone, cursing as the bars appear and disappear. I reach another of my contacts. “I spoke to Dr. Khalil,” he says. “If they behave bad with you, don’t worry ? they just want to punish you.” Shafiq also tells me not to worry ? that he will die defending me if necessary. My only hope, I realize, is the Pashtun code of hospitality known as Pashtunwali ? the same tradition that forbade the Taliban from handing over Osama bin Laden to the Bush administration after September 11th. Unfortunately, as young Taliban fighters have substituted their own authority for tribal customs, more and more insurgents now ignore the code. “All the old rules have broken down,” an aid official who has spent two decades in Afghanistan tells me. The guarantees of safety that once protected civilians have been replaced by a new generation removed from traditional society ? one for whom jihad is the only law.

Our car crawls through the empty desert. I can see nothing on the horizon. I ask Shafiq if Dr. Khalil is a good guy. “He’s like you,” Shafiq answers. “No Muslim is a bad man.” His faith in the brotherhood of Islam does little to reassure me. “Don’t worry,” Shafiq says. “The Doctor has a gun, and I have a gun.”

Ibrahim calls to say that he has reached a Taliban leader in Pakistan, as well as someone in the United Arab Emirates, and they have promised to call the Doctor and tell him not to harm me. “The Doctor will fight with me, not with you,” says Shafiq, who seems to be warming to the idea of bloodshed. My contact in Kabul calls again. “They might slap you, but they won’t kill you,” he tells me. “It’s just to punish you for coming without permission. They might keep you overnight as a guest. You are lucky you called me.” Later, he tells me that the Doctor had assured him that he would not “do anything that isn’t Sharia,” or Islamic law. This was little consolation, even after the fact, since the Taliban’s interpretation of Sharia includes beheading.

“I’m a martyr, I’m a star,” the Taliban on the car’s tape deck chants. “I will testify on behalf of my mother on Judgment Day. When I was small, my mother put me on her lap and spoke sweetly to me….”

We finally arrive at a mosque somewhere between the villages of Gabari and Sher Kala. The Doctor, I am told, is waiting for us inside. As I enter, I inadvertently step on a pair of Prada sunglasses ? just as the Doctor walks into the room.

A burly man with light skin and a dark brown beard, the Doctor picks up the bent glasses and examines them somberly. His hands are thick, enormous. He wears a white cap, with palm trees and suns embroidered in white thread. He straightens the glasses and puts them on ? it turns out they’re his. My heart sinks. Not the best beginning, perhaps.

After everyone prays, the Doctor orders the others to leave the room, except for Yusuf. His voice is low and gruff. We sit on the floor. “Deir Obekhi,” I say, apologizing for entering his territory without permission. He accuses me of being a spy for the Afghan army. He asks how I got a visa to Afghanistan. I tell him I am here to write about the mujahedeen and tell their story. If I like them so much, he sneers, why don’t I join them?

The Doctor asks about my contact. I say he fought with the mujahedeen from Jamiat-i Islami. The Doctor scoffs, saying the man never fought the Soviets. Then he gets to his feet and announces that he is going to make phone calls to Pakistan to investigate me. We will have to spend the night in the mosque, and he will come back for us in the morning. As I try to protest, he stalks out.

I sit glumly on the floor in the guest room. A few minutes later, Shafiq sticks his head in and says, “Yallah” ? Arabic for “come on.” I jump up, relieved to get out of there. The Talib fighters sitting with us insist that we drink the tea they have made. I hurriedly gulp it down and step out into the darkness, eager to get away from the mosque. But Shafiq has more bad news: We will have to return in the morning. My mind flashes to the videos I have seen on the Internet of victims being decapitated by jihadists in Iraq and Afghanistan.

We get in the car and Shafiq drives slowly, winding through nearly invisible paths, the moonlight obscured by dust. When we reach Shafiq’s house, he carries a television into the guest room and turns on the generator. Reading the English titles on the program guide, he finds Al-Jazeera, the Arabic news channel. We watch coverage of the attacks we drove by the day before. Shafiq switches to an Afghan channel, and we watch an Indian soap opera dubbed in Dari. The women are dressed in revealing Western attire. I am amazed that Shafiq would watch something so anathema to the Taliban. It’s OK, he tells me ? “it’s a drama about a family.” Later he puts on a satellite channel devoted to Iranian-American pop music. We watch as a portly singer with stubble and long hair imitates bad Eighties rock, but in Farsi. The next video features an Iranian pop singer dressed in leather fringe and a tank top, like a cross between Davy Crockett and Richard Simmons. The Taliban commander watches, mesmerized.

In the morning, I awake to the drone of military planes overhead. Stepping outside, I see a convoy of American armored vehicles a mile away. I fight the urge to walk to them and beg for rescue. Even if they don’t mistake me for Taliban and shoot me themselves, approaching them would doom everybody who had helped me.

I wait impatiently for the phone network to go back up. When it does, one of my contacts in Kabul tells me that he had spoken to senior Taliban officials who told the Doctor not to harm me, but the Doctor continued to insist that I am a spy. He thinks the Doctor is just trying to assert his independence and exchange me for a ransom. He tells me that Mullah Nasir, a one-armed Kandahari who serves as Taliban governor for Ghazni, is also trying to secure my release. I try to convince Shafiq to drive me to Ghazni’s capital, but he says that if he doesn’t return me to Dr. Khalil, the Doctor will arrest him.

In the end, I am saved by the same official who authorized my trip. According to my contact, the Taliban minister of defense called Dr. Khalil and ordered him to release me, warning the Doctor that “he would be fucked” if anything happens to me. My contact tells me I will be let go this afternoon but that once we are on the road we should take the batteries out of our phones, to prevent anyone from tracking us. “This Doctor, he is a very nasty guy,” he says. “He might send somebody to kidnap you on the way, and then I can do nothing for you.”

As we wait for the Doctor to arrive, Shafiq has other problems to deal with. His nephew has been arrested by a Taliban patrol after being spotted walking with a girl. After Shafiq secures his release, other Talib fighters call to complain that they heard music coming from his house the night before. Exasperated, Shafiq protests that it was only Al-Jazeera. He doesn’t mention the Iranian pop singer.

A few hours later, Dr. Khalil finally shows up. He examines my passport and leafs through my notebooks, asking me to show him the photos I took. “Zaibullah Mujahed said I should hit you,” he says, referring to the chief Taliban spokesman. “But I will not.” Rifling through my bags, he seems particularly fascinated by my toothbrush. Puzzled, he riffles the bristles with his finger, trying to deduce their purpose.

For a man who has spent much of the past 24 hours contemplating whether I was worth more to him dead or alive, the Doctor is now surprisingly friendly. “What can I do for you?” he asks, a model of courtesy. I cautiously ask him a few questions. The Doctor tells me he studied at an Islamic school in Pakistan before entering medical school in Afghanistan. He joined the Taliban early, eventually serving as a commander in a northern district. He says he is fighting to restore a government of Islamic law, but that Mullah Omar does not have to be the leader again. God willing, he adds, it will take no more than 30 years to rid Afghanistan of foreigners. Like the other Taliban leaders I’ve spoken with, he says he is prepared to allow women to attend school and to work.

We pile into the Corolla and drive off to meet Ibrahim, loading an RPG into the trunk just in case. Dr. Khalil gets behind the wheel, with Shafiq beside him holding the PKM. After an hour of driving, the car gets stuck, and we all collect rocks to put beneath the tires. As we drive through the Doctor’s village, he points to its outer limits. “This is the border between the Taliban and the government,” he says, stressing his control. He is now jocular and relaxed.

At the edge of town, close to the main road, the Doctor gets out of the car, followed by Shafiq, holding his PKM. The locals appear stunned. Everyone stops and stares, immobilized, their daily routine interrupted by the sudden appearance of two heavily armed Taliban commanders escorting a large foreign man in ill-fitting salwar kameez. The Doctor stops a pickup truck and orders the driver to take us to the bazaar. We part warmly.

Arriving at the bazaar in the back of the pickup truck, we find a tense and apologetic Ibrahim waiting for us. Like my contact, he was worried that the Doctor had set up an ambush for me on the road. “I should not have left you,” Ibrahim says. “I was lazy. That was my mistake.”

On the way back to Kabul, we dodge more craters in the highway. The military trucks I saw burning two days earlier are still smoldering by the road. Children play on the blackened vehicles, removing pieces for salvage. I tease Ibrahim that the Taliban have made our drive more difficult by destroying the highway. To my surprise, he agrees.

Back in Kabul, we all have lunch together at the office of my friend where I first met Ibrahim. My friend teases me for sending him so many text messages ? more than a dozen ? and reads some of them aloud. Everyone laughs, relieved that the ordeal is over. I look at Ibrahim, wondering if he would have taken me hostage himself under different circumstances. He again surprises me by expressing disapproval of the Taliban for harming civilians in what he views as a war for national liberation. There used to be rules. Now, for many Taliban, there is only killing. “They are not acting like Afghans,” he says.

To return to Kabul from a feudal province like Ghazni is to experience a form of time travel. The city is thoroughly modern, for those who can afford it: five-star hotels, shiny new shopping malls and well-guarded restaurants where foreigners eat meals that cost as much as most Afghans make in a month, cooked with ingredients imported from abroad. If you can avoid falling into the sewage canals at every crosswalk, and evade the suicide bombers who occasionally rock the city, you can enjoy the safety of Afghanistan’s version of the Green Zone.

But the barbarians are at the gate, and major attacks are getting closer and closer to the city each day. Upon my return to Kabul, I discover that the Taliban have fired rockets at the airport and at the NATO base; the United Nations has been on a four-day curfew; and President Karzai has canceled his public appearances. The city is being slowly but systematically severed from the rest of the country.

“The road from Kabul to Ghazni is gone,” an intelligence officer tells me, “and most of the rest of the roads are going. The ambushes are routine now, which tells you that the Taliban have a routine capability.” The Parwan province, which borders Kabul to the north, has also become dangerous. “All of a sudden we see IEDs on the main road in Parwan and attacks on police checkpoints,” the intelligence officer says. “It’s the last remaining key arterial route connecting Kabul to the rest of the country.”

The Bush administration is placing its hopes on presidential elections in Afghanistan next year, but everyone I speak with in Kabul agrees that the elections will be a joke. “The Americans are gung-ho about elections,” a longtime nongovernmental official tells me. “But it will only exacerbate ethnic tensions.” In Pashtun areas controlled by the Taliban, registration would be virtually impossible, and voting would invoke a death sentence ? effectively disenfranchising the country’s dominant ethnic group. “You can’t fix the insurgency with an election,” a senior U.N. official tells me. “It’s a socioeconomic phenomenon that goes well beyond the border of Afghanistan.” Real elections would require the cooperation of the Taliban ? and that, in turn, would require negotiations with the Taliban. The war, in effect, is already lost.

“This can’t be solved other than by talking to the Taliban,” says a top diplomat in Kabul. A leading aid official adds that it is important to understand the ideological goal of the Taliban: “They don’t have an international-terrorist agenda ? they have an Afghanistan agenda. We might not agree with their agenda for the country, but that’s not our war.” Former Taliban leaders agree that only talks will end the war. “If the U.S. deals with Pakistan and negotiates with higher-level Taliban,” says one, “then it could reach a deal.”

Negotiating with the Taliban would also enable the Americans to take advantage of the sharp divisions within the insurgency. Mullah Omar, the Taliban leader, has been openly criticized by a rival named Siirajudin Haqqani, who has called for Omar to be replaced. In provinces like Ghazni, the Taliban leadership is now divided between commanders loyal to Omar and men who follow Haqqani. A recent meeting between supporters of the two men in the Pakistani city of Peshawar reportedly descended into fighting when an Omar official threw his tea glass at a Haqqani man. The internal split provides an opening ? if U.S. intelligence is smart enough to exploit it.
“The U.S. should try to weaken the Taliban,” a former Taliban commander tells me. “They should make groups, divide and conquer. If someone wants to use the division between Haqqani and Omar, they can.”

The Bush administration believes it can stop the Taliban by throwing money into clinics and schools. But even humanitarian officials scoff at the idea. “If you gave jobs to the Viet Cong, would they stop fighting?” asks one. “Two years ago you could build a road or a bridge in a village and say, ‘Please don’t let the Taliban come in.’ But now you’ve reached the stage where the hearts-and-minds business doesn’t work.”

Officials on the ground in Afghanistan say it is foolhardy to believe that the Americans can prevail where the Russians failed. At the height of the occupation, the Soviets had 120,000 of their own troops in Afghanistan, buttressed by roughly 300,000 Afghan troops. The Americans and their allies, by contrast, have 65,000 troops on the ground, backed up by only 137,000 Afghan security forces ? and they face a Taliban who enjoy the support of a well-funded and highly organized network of Islamic extremists. “The end for the Americans will be just like for the Russians,” says a former commander who served in the Taliban government. “The Americans will never succeed in containing the conflict. There will be more bleeding. It’s coming to the same situation as it did for the communist forces, who found themselves confined to the provincial capitals.”

Simply put, it is too late for Bush’s “quiet surge” ? or even for Barack Obama’s plan for a more robust reinforcement ? to work in Afghanistan. More soldiers on the ground will only lead to more contact with the enemy, and more air support for troops will only lead to more civilian casualties that will alienate even more Afghans. Sooner or later, the American government will be forced to the negotiating table, just as the Soviets were before them.

“The rise of the Taliban insurgency is not likely to be reversed,” says Abdulkader Sinno, a Middle East scholar and the author of Organizations at War in Afghanistan and Beyond. “It will only get stronger. Many local leaders who are sitting on the fence right now ? or are even nominally allied with the government ? are likely to shift their support to the Taliban in the coming years. What’s more, the direct U.S. military involvement in Afghanistan is now likely to spill over into Pakistan. It may be tempting to attack the safe havens of the Taliban and Al Qaeda across the border, but that will only produce a worst-case scenario for the United States. Attacks by the U.S. would attract the support of hundreds of millions of Muslims in South Asia. It would also break up Pakistan, leading to a civil war, the collapse of its military and the possible unleashing of its nuclear arsenal.”

In the same speech in which he promised a surge, Bush vowed that he would never allow the Taliban to return to power in Afghanistan. But they have already returned, and only negotiation with them can bring any hope of stability. Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan “are all theaters in the same overall struggle,” the president declared, linking his administration’s three greatest foreign-policy disasters in one broad vision. In the end, Bush said, we must have “faith in the power of freedom.”

But the Taliban have their own faith, and so far, they are winning. On my last day in Kabul, a Western aid official reminds me of the words of a high-ranking Taliban leader, who recently explained why the United States will never prevail in Afghanistan.

“You Westerners have your watches,” the leader observed. “But we Taliban have time.”

Time to quit Afghanistan
Canada’s $22-billion little war must give way to a negotiated peace settlement

By ERIC MARGOLIS
  October 5, 2008
At last, a faint glimmer of light at the end of the Afghan tunnel.

Last week, the U.S.-installed Afghan president, Hamid Karzai, revealed he had asked Saudi Arabia to broker peace talks with the alliance of tribal and political groups resisting western occupation collectively known as the Taliban.

Taliban leader Mullah Omar quickly rejected Karzai’s offer and claimed the U.S. was headed toward the same kind of catastrophic defeat in Afghanistan that the Soviet Union met. The ongoing financial panic in North America lent a certain credence to his words.

Meanwhile, the U.S. commander in Afghanistan, Gen. David McKiernan, urgently called for at least 10,000 more troops but, significantly, also proposed political talks with the Taliban. U.S. and NATO forces in Afghanistan are increasingly on the defensive, hard pressed to defend vulnerable supply lines in spite of massive fire power and total control of the air.

I recently asked Karl Rove, President George W. Bush’s former senior adviser, how this seemingly impossible war could be won. His eyes dancing with imperial hubris, Rove replied, “More Predators (missile armed drones) and helicopters!” Which reminded me of poet Hilaire Belloc’s wonderful line about British imperialism, “Whatever happens/we have got/the Maxim gun (machine gun)/and they have not.”

Though Karzai’s olive branch was rejected, the fact he made it public is very important. By doing so, he broke the simple-minded western taboo against negotiations with the Taliban and its allies.

DRUG FIGHTERS

The Taliban was founded as an Islamic religious movement dedicated to fighting communism and the drug trade. It received U.S. funding until May 2001. But western war propaganda has so demonized the Taliban that few politicians have the courage to propose the obvious and inevitable: A negotiated settlement to this pointless seven-year war. Even NATO’s secretary general, Jaap de Hoop Scheffer, said the war could only be ended by negotiations, not military means.

The Taliban and its allies are mostly Pashtuns (or Pathans), who comprise half of Afghanistan’s population. They have been largely excluded from political power by the U.S.-backed Kabul regime, which relies on Tajik and Uzbek ethnic minorities, chiefs of the old Afghan Communist Party, and the nation’s leading drug lords.

Canada, which lacks funds for modern medical care, has spent a staggering $22 billion to support its little war against the Pashtun tribes. It’s a war which Canada’s defence minister actually claimed is necessary so that Canadian delegates would be “taken seriously” at international meetings. A better path to credibility might be to not plagiarize from other right wing leader’s speeches.

Ottawa and Washington should listen to Karzai who, despite being a U.S.-installed “asset,” is also a decent man who cares about his nation. In fact, Ottawa should remember Canada’s venerable position as an international peacemaker, a role that has made it one of the world’s most respected nations.

Mr. Harper’s role model, George W. Bush, is probably the most disliked man on earth and certainly America’s worst president in history, who has led his nation from disaster to calamity. Only 22% of Americans support Bush. Half of them believe Elvis is still alive.

The Taliban are not “terrorists.” The movement had nothing to do with 9/11 though it did shelter Osama bin Laden, a national hero of the war against the Soviets. Only a handful of al-Qaida are left in Afghanistan.

The current war is not really about al-Qaida and “terrorism,” but about opening a secure corridor through Pashtun tribal territory to export the oil and gas riches of the Caspian Basin to the West. Canada and the rest of NATO have no business being pipeline protection troops. Canada’s military intervention in Afghanistan has jeopardized its national security by putting it on the map as an anti-Muslim nation joined at the hip with Bush and his ruinous policies.

As the great Benjamin Franklin said, “there is no good war, and no bad peace.”

I hope Ottawa will have the courage to admit it was wrong about Afghanistan and bring its troops home—now.

Make-Believe Maverick
Thursday 16 October 2008
by: Tim Dickinson, Rolling Stone
http://www.rollingstone.com/news/coverstory/make_believe_maverick_the_real_john_mccain

    A closer look at the life and career of John McCain reveals a disturbing record of recklessness and dishonesty.

  At Fort McNair, an army base located along the Potomac River in the nation’s capital, a chance reunion takes place one day between two former POWs. It’s the spring of 1974, and Navy commander John Sidney McCain III has returned home from the experience in Hanoi that, according to legend, transformed him from a callow and reckless youth into a serious man of patriotism and purpose. Walking along the grounds at Fort McNair, McCain runs into John Dramesi, an Air Force lieutenant colonel who was also imprisoned and tortured in Vietnam.

  McCain is studying at the National War College, a prestigious graduate program he had to pull strings with the Secretary of the Navy to get into. Dramesi is enrolled, on his own merit, at the Industrial College of the Armed Forces in the building next door.

  There’s a distance between the two men that belies their shared experience in North Vietnam - call it an honor gap. Like many American POWs, McCain broke down under torture and offered a “confession” to his North Vietnamese captors. Dramesi, in contrast, attempted two daring escapes. For the second he was brutalized for a month with daily torture sessions that nearly killed him. His partner in the escape, Lt. Col. Ed Atterberry, didn’t survive the mistreatment. But Dramesi never said a disloyal word, and for his heroism was awarded two Air Force Crosses, one of the service’s highest distinctions. McCain would later hail him as “one of the toughest guys I’ve ever met.”

  On the grounds between the two brick colleges, the chitchat between the scion of four-star admirals and the son of a prizefighter turns to their academic travels; both colleges sponsor a trip abroad for young officers to network with military and political leaders in a distant corner of the globe.

  “I’m going to the Middle East,” Dramesi says. “Turkey, Kuwait, Lebanon, Iran.”

  “Why are you going to the Middle East?” McCain asks, dismissively.

  “It’s a place we’re probably going to have some problems,” Dramesi says.

  “Why? Where are you going to, John?”

  “Oh, I’m going to Rio.”

  “What the hell are you going to Rio for?”

  McCain, a married father of three, shrugs.

  “I got a better chance of getting laid.”

  Dramesi, who went on to serve as chief war planner for U.S. Air Forces in Europe and commander of a wing of the Strategic Air Command, was not surprised. “McCain says his life changed while he was in Vietnam, and he is now a different man,” Dramesi says today. “But he’s still the undisciplined, spoiled brat that he was when he went in.”

  McCain First

  This is the story of the real John McCain, the one who has been hiding in plain sight. It is the story of a man who has consistently put his own advancement above all else, a man willing to say and do anything to achieve his ultimate ambition: to become commander in chief, ascending to the one position that would finally enable him to outrank his four-star father and grandfather.

  In its broad strokes, McCain’s life story is oddly similar to that of the current occupant of the White House. John Sidney McCain III and George Walker Bush both represent the third generation of American dynasties. Both were born into positions of privilege against which they rebelled into mediocrity. Both developed an uncanny social intelligence that allowed them to skate by with a minimum of mental exertion. Both struggled with booze and loutish behavior. At each step, with the aid of their fathers’ powerful friends, both failed upward. And both shed their skins as Episcopalian members of the Washington elite to build political careers as self-styled, ranch-inhabiting Westerners who pray to Jesus in their wives’ evangelical churches.

  In one vital respect, however, the comparison is deeply unfair to the current president: George W. Bush was a much better pilot.

  This, of course, is not the story McCain tells about himself. Few politicians have so actively, or successfully, crafted their own myth of greatness. In Mc- Cain’s version of his life, he is a prodigal son who, steeled by his brutal internment in Vietnam, learned to put “country first.” Remade by the Keating Five scandal that nearly wrecked his career, the story goes, McCain re-emerged as a “reformer” and a “maverick,” righteously eschewing anything that “might even tangentially be construed as a less than proper use of my office.”

  It’s a myth McCain has cultivated throughout his decades in Washington. But during the course of this year’s campaign, the mask has slipped. “Let’s face it,” says Larry Wilkerson, a retired Army colonel who served as chief of staff to Secretary of State Colin Powell. “John McCain made his reputation on the fact that he doesn’t bend his principles for politics. That’s just not true.”

  We have now watched McCain run twice for president. The first time he positioned himself as a principled centrist and decried the politics of Karl Rove and the influence of the religious right, imploring voters to judge candidates “by the example we set, by the way we conduct our campaigns, by the way we personally practice politics.” After he lost in 2000, he jagged hard to the left - breaking with the president over taxes, drilling, judicial appointments, even flirting with joining the Democratic Party.

  In his current campaign, however, McCain has become the kind of politician he ran against in 2000. He has embraced those he once denounced as “agents of intolerance,” promised more drilling and deeper tax cuts, even compromised his vaunted opposition to torture. Intent on winning the presidency at all costs, he has reassembled the very team that so viciously smeared him and his family eight years ago, selecting as his running mate a born-again moose hunter whose only qualification for office is her ability to electrify Rove’s base. And he has engaged in a “practice of politics” so deceptive that even Rove himself has denounced it, saying that the outright lies in McCain’s campaign ads go “too far” and fail the “truth test.”

  The missing piece of this puzzle, says a former McCain confidant who has fallen out with the senator over his neoconservatism, is a third, never realized, campaign that McCain intended to run against Bush in 2004. “McCain wanted a rematch, based on ethics, campaign finance and Enron - the corrupt relationship between Bush’s team and the corporate sector,” says the former friend, a prominent conservative thinker with whom McCain shared his plans over the course of several dinners in 2001. “But when 9/11 happened, McCain saw his chance to challenge Bush again was robbed. He saw 9/11 gave Bush and his failed presidency a second life. He saw Bush and Cheney’s ability to draw stark contrasts between black and white, villains and good guys. And that’s why McCain changed.” (The McCain campaign did not respond to numerous requests for comment from Rolling Stone.)

  Indeed, many leading Republicans who once admired McCain see his recent contortions to appease the GOP base as the undoing of a maverick. “John McCain’s ambition overrode his basic character,” says Rita Hauser, who served on the President’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board from 2001 to 2004. But the truth of the matter is that ambition is John McCain’s basic character. Seen in the sweep of his seven-decade personal history, his pandering to the right is consistent with the only constant in his life: doing what’s best for himself. To put the matter squarely: John McCain is his own special interest.

  “John has made a pact with the devil,” says Lincoln Chafee, the former GOP senator, who has been appalled at his one-time colleague’s readiness to sacrifice principle for power. Chafee and McCain were the only Republicans to vote against the Bush tax cuts. They locked arms in opposition to drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. And they worked together in the “Gang of 14,” which blocked some of Bush’s worst judges from the federal bench.

  “On all three - sadly, sadly, sadly - McCain has flip-flopped,” Chafee says. And forget all the “Country First” sloganeering, he adds. “McCain is putting himself first. He’s putting himself first in blinking neon lights.”

  The Navy Brat

  John Sidney McCain III has spent most of his life trying to escape the shadow of greater men. His grandfather Adm. John Sidney “Slew” McCain earned his four stars commanding a U.S. carrier force in World War II. His deeply ambitious father, Adm. “Junior” McCain, reached the same rank, commanding America’s forces in the Pacific during Vietnam.

  The youngest McCain was not cut from the same cloth. Even as a toddler, McCain recalls in Faith of My Fathers, his volcanic temper was on display. “At the smallest provocation,” he would hold his breath until he passed out: “I would go off in a mad frenzy, and then, suddenly, crash to the floor unconscious.” His parents cured him of this habit in a way only a CIA interrogator could appreciate: by dropping their blue-faced boy in a bathtub of ice-cold water.

  Trailing his hard-charging, hard-drinking father from post to post, McCain didn’t play well with others. Indeed, he concedes, his runty physique inspired a Napoleon complex: “My small stature motivated me to ... fight the first kid who provoked me.”

  McCain spent his formative years among the Washington elite. His father - himself deep in the throes of a daddy complex - had secured a political post as the Navy’s chief liaison to the Senate, a job his son would later hold, and the McCain home on Southeast 1st Street was a high-powered pit stop in the Washington cocktail circuit. Growing up, McCain attended Episcopal High School, an all-white, all-boys boarding school across the Potomac in Virginia, where tuition today tops $40,000 a year. There, McCain behaved with all the petulance his privilege allowed, earning the nicknames “Punk” and “McNasty.” Even his friends seemed to dislike him, with one recalling him as “a mean little fucker.”

  McCain was not only a lousy student, he had his father’s taste for drink and a darkly misogynistic streak. The summer after his sophomore year, cruising with a friend near Arlington, McCain tried to pick up a pair of young women. When they laughed at him, he cursed them so vilely that he was hauled into court on a profanity charge.

  McCain’s admittance to Annapolis was preordained by his bloodline. But martial discipline did not seem to have much of an impact on his character. By his own account, McCain was a lazy, incurious student; he squeaked by only by prevailing upon his buddies to help him cram for exams. He continued to get sauced and treat girls badly. Before meeting a girlfriend’s parents for the first time, McCain got so shitfaced that he literally crashed through the screen door when he showed up in his white midshipman’s uniform.

  His grandfather’s name and his father’s forbearance brought McCain a charmed existence at Annapolis. On his first trip at sea - to Rio de Janeiro aboard the USS Hunt - the captain was a former student of his father. While McCain’s classmates learned the ins and outs of the boiler room, McCain got to pilot the ship to South America and back. In Rio, he hobnobbed with admirals and the president of Brazil.

  Back on campus, McCain’s short fuse was legend. “We’d hear this thunderous screaming and yelling between him and his roommate - doors slamming - and one of them would go running down the hall,” recalls Phil Butler, who lived across the hall from McCain at the academy. “It was a regular occurrence.”

  When McCain was not shown the pampering to which he was accustomed, he grew petulant - even abusive. He repeatedly blew up in the face of his commanding officer. It was the kind of insubordination that would have gotten any other midshipman kicked out of Annapolis. But his classmates soon realized that McCain was untouchable. Midway though his final year, McCain faced expulsion, about to “bilge out” because of excessive demerits. After his mother intervened, however, the academy’s commandant stepped in. Calling McCain “spoiled” to his face, he nonetheless issued a reprieve, scaling back the demerits. McCain dodged expulsion a second time by convincing another midshipman to take the fall after McCain was caught with contraband.

  “He was a huge screw-off,” recalls Butler. “He was always on probation. The only reason he graduated was because of his father and his grandfather - they couldn’t exactly get rid of him.”

  McCain’s self-described “four-year course of insubordination” ended with him graduating fifth from the bottom - 894th out of a class of 899. It was a record of mediocrity he would continue as a pilot.

  Bottom Gun

  In the cockpit, McCain was not a top gun, or even a middling gun. He took little interest in his flight manuals; he had other priorities.

  “I enjoyed the off-duty life of a Navy flier more than I enjoyed the actual flying,” McCain writes. “I drove a Corvette, dated a lot, spent all my free hours at bars and beach parties.” McCain chased a lot of tail. He hit the dog track. Developed a taste for poker and dice. He picked up models when he could, screwed a stripper when he couldn’t.

  In the air, the hard-partying McCain had a knack for stalling out his planes in midflight. He was still in training, in Texas, when he crashed his first plane into Corpus Christi Bay during a routine practice landing. The plane stalled, and McCain was knocked cold on impact. When he came to, the plane was underwater, and he had to swim to the surface to be rescued. Some might take such a near-death experience as a wake-up call: McCain took some painkillers and a nap, and then went out carousing that night.

  Off duty on his Mediterranean tours, McCain frequented the casinos of Monte Carlo, cultivating his taste for what he calls the “addictive” game of craps. McCain’s thrill-seeking carried over into his day job. Flying over the south of Spain one day, he decided to deviate from his flight plan. Rocketing along mere feet above the ground, his plane sliced through a power line. His self-described “daredevil clowning” plunged much of the area into a blackout.

  That should have been the end of McCain’s flying career. “In the Navy, if you crashed one airplane, nine times out of 10 you would lose your wings,” says Butler, who, like his former classmate, was shot down and taken prisoner in North Vietnam. Spark “a small international incident” like McCain had? Any other pilot would have “found themselves as the deck officer on a destroyer someplace in a hurry,” says Butler.

  “But, God, he had family pull. He was directly related to the CEO - you know?”

  McCain was undeterred by the crashes. Nearly a decade out of the academy, his career adrift, he decided he wanted to fly combat in Vietnam. His motivation wasn’t to contain communism or put his country first. It was the only way he could think of to earn the respect of the man he calls his “distant, inscrutable patriarch.” He needed to secure a command post in the Navy - and to do that, his career needed the jump-start that only a creditable war record could provide.

  As he would so many times in his career, McCain pulled strings to get ahead. After a game of tennis, McCain prevailed upon the undersecretary of the Navy that he was ready for Vietnam, despite his abysmal flight record. Sure enough, McCain was soon transferred to McCain Field - an air base in Meridian, Mississippi, named after his grandfather - to train for a post on the carrier USS Forrestal.

  With a close friend at the base, an alcoholic Marine captain, McCain formed the “Key Fess Yacht Club,” which quickly became infamous for hosting toga parties in the officers’ quarters and bringing bands down from Memphis to attract loose women to the base. Showing his usual knack for promotion, McCain rose from “vice commodore” to “commodore” of the club.

  In 1964, while still at the base, McCain began a serious romance with Carol Shepp, a vivacious former model who had just divorced one of his classmates from Annapolis. Commandeering a Navy plane, McCain spent most weekends flying from Meridian to Philadelphia for their dates. They married the following summer.

  That December, McCain crashed again. Flying back from Philadelphia, where he had joined in the reverie of the Army-Navy football game, McCain stalled while coming in for a refueling stop in Norfolk, Virginia. This time he managed to bail out at 1,000 feet. As his parachute deployed, his plane thundered into the trees below.

  By now, however, McCain’s flying privileges were virtually irrevocable - and he knew it. On one of his runs at McCain Field, when ground control put him in a holding pattern, the lieutenant commander once again pulled his family’s rank. “Let me land,” McCain demanded over his radio, “or I’ll take my field and go home!”

  Trial by Fire

  Sometimes 3 a.m. moments occur at 10:52 in the morning.

  It was July 29th, 1967, a hot, gusty morning in the Gulf of Tonkin atop the four-acre flight deck of the supercarrier USS Forrestal. Perched in the cockpit of his A-4 Skyhawk, Lt. Cmdr. John McCain ticked nervously through his preflight checklist.

  Now 30 years old, McCain was trying to live up to his father’s expectations, to finally be known as something other than the fuck-up grandson of one of the Navy’s greatest admirals. That morning, preparing for his sixth bombing run over North Vietnam, the graying pilot’s dreams of combat glory were beginning to seem within his reach.

  Then, in an instant, the world around McCain erupted in flames. A six-foot-long Zuni rocket, inexplicably launched by an F-4 Phantom across the flight deck, ripped through the fuel tank of McCain’s aircraft. Hundreds of gallons of fuel splashed onto the deck and came ablaze. Then: Clank. Clank. Two 1,000-pound bombs dropped from under the belly of McCain’s stubby A-4, the Navy’s “Tinkertoy Bomber,” into the fire.

  McCain, who knew more than most pilots about bailing out of a crippled aircraft, leapt forward out of the cockpit, swung himself down from the refueling probe protruding from the nose cone, rolled through the flames and ran to safety across the flight deck. Just then, one of his bombs “cooked off,” blowing a crater in the deck and incinerating the sailors who had rushed past McCain with hoses and fire extinguishers. McCain was stung by tiny bits of shrapnel in his legs and chest, but the wounds weren’t serious; his father would later report to friends that Johnny “came through without a scratch.”

  The damage to the Forrestal was far more grievous: The explosion set off a chain reaction of bombs, creating a devastating inferno that would kill 134 of the carrier’s 5,000-man crew, injure 161 and threaten to sink the ship.

  These are the moments that test men’s mettle. Where leaders are born. Leaders like ... Lt. Cmdr. Herb Hope, pilot of the A-4 three planes down from McCain’s. Cornered by flames at the stern of the carrier, Hope hurled himself off the flight deck into a safety net and clambered into the hangar deck below, where the fire was spreading. According to an official Navy history of the fire, Hope then “gallantly took command of a firefighting team” that would help contain the conflagration and ultimately save the ship.

  McCain displayed little of Hope’s valor. Although he would soon regale The New York Times with tales of the heroism of the brave enlisted men who “stayed to help the pilots fight the fire,” McCain took no part in dousing the flames himself. After going belowdecks and briefly helping sailors who were frantically trying to unload bombs from an elevator to the flight deck, McCain retreated to the safety of the “ready room,” where off-duty pilots spent their noncombat hours talking trash and playing poker. There, McCain watched the conflagration unfold on the room’s closed-circuit television - bearing distant witness to the valiant self-sacrifice of others who died trying to save the ship, pushing jets into the sea to keep their bombs from exploding on deck.

  As the ship burned, McCain took a moment to mourn his misfortune; his combat career appeared to be going up in smoke. “This distressed me considerably,” he recalls in Faith of My Fathers. “I feared my ambitions were among the casualties in the calamity that had claimed the Forrestal.”

  The fire blazed late into the night. The following morning, while oxygen-masked rescue workers toiled to recover bodies from the lower decks, McCain was making fast friends with R.W. “Johnny” Apple of The New York Times, who had arrived by helicopter to cover the deadliest Naval calamity since the Second World War. The son of admiralty surviving a near-death experience certainly made for good copy, and McCain colorfully recounted how he had saved his skin. But when Apple and other reporters left the ship, the story took an even stranger turn: McCain left with them. As the heroic crew of the Forrestal mourned its fallen brothers and the broken ship limped toward the Philippines for repairs, McCain zipped off to Saigon for what he recalls as “some welcome R&R.”

  Violating the Code

  Ensconced in Apple’s villa in Saigon, McCain and the Times reporter forged a relationship that would prove critical to the ambitious pilot’s career in the years ahead. Apple effectively became the charter member of McCain’s media “base,” an elite corps of admiring reporters who helped create his reputation for “straight talk.”

  Sipping scotch and reflecting on the fire aboard the Forrestal, McCain sounded like the peaceniks he would pillory after his return from Hanoi. “Now that I’ve seen what the bombs and napalm did to the people on our ship,” he told Apple, “I’m not so sure that I want to drop any more of that stuff on North Vietnam.” Here, it seemed, was a frank-talking warrior, one willing to speak out against the military establishment in the name of truth.

  But McCain’s misgivings about the righteousness of the fight quickly took a back seat to his ambitions. Within days, eager to get his combat career back on track, he put in for a transfer to the carrier USS Oriskany. Two months after the Forrestal fire - following a holiday on the French Riviera - McCain reported for duty in the Gulf of Tonkin.

  McCain performed adequately on the Oriskany. On October 25th, 1967, he bombed a pair of Soviet MiGs parked on an airfield outside Hanoi. His record was now even. Enemy planes destroyed by McCain: two. American planes destroyed by McCain: two.

  The next day, McCain embarked on his fateful 23rd mission, a bombing raid on a power plant in downtown Hanoi. McCain had cajoled his way onto the strike force - there were medals up for grabs. The plant had recently been rebuilt after a previous bombing run that had earned two of the lead pilots Navy Crosses, one of the force’s top honors.

  It was a dangerous mission - taking the planes into the teeth of North Vietnam’s fiercest anti-aircraft defenses. As the planes entered Hanoi airspace, they were instantly enveloped in dark clouds of flak and surface-to-air missiles. Still cocky from the previous day’s kills, McCain took the biggest gamble of his life. As he dived in on the target in his A-4, his surface-to-air missile warning system sounded: A SAM had a lock on him. “I knew I should roll out and fly evasive maneuvers,” McCain writes. “The A-4 is a small, fast” aircraft that “can outmaneuver a tracking SAM.”

  But McCain didn’t “jink.” Instead, he stayed on target and let fly his bombs - just as the SAM blew his wing off.

  To watch the Republican National Convention and listen to Fred Thompson’s account of John McCain’s internment in Vietnam, you would think that McCain never gave his captors anything beyond his name, rank, service number and, under duress, the names of the Green Bay Packers offensive line. His time in Hanoi, we’re to understand, steeled the man - transforming him from a fighter jock who put himself first into a patriot who would henceforth selflessly serve the public good.

  There is no question that McCain suffered hideously in North Vietnam. His ejection over a lake in downtown Hanoi broke his knee and both his arms. During his capture, he was bayoneted in the ankle and the groin, and had his shoulder smashed by a rifle butt. His tormentors dragged McCain’s broken body to a cell and seemed content to let him expire from his injuries. For the next two years, there were few days that he was not in agony.

  But the subsequent tale of McCain’s mistreatment - and the transformation it is alleged to have produced - are both deeply flawed. The Code of Conduct that governed POWs was incredibly rigid; few soldiers lived up to its dictate that they “give no information ... which might be harmful to my comrades.” Under the code, POWs are bound to give only their name, rank, date of birth and service number - and to make no “statements disloyal to my country.”

  Soon after McCain hit the ground in Hanoi, the code went out the window. “I’ll give you military information if you will take me to the hospital,” he later admitted pleading with his captors. McCain now insists the offer was a bluff, designed to fool the enemy into giving him medical treatment. In fact, his wounds were attended to only after the North Vietnamese discovered that his father was a Navy admiral. What has never been disclosed is the manner in which they found out: McCain told them. According to Dramesi, one of the few POWs who remained silent under years of torture, McCain tried to justify his behavior while they were still prisoners. “I had to tell them,” he insisted to Dramesi, “or I would have died in bed.”

  Dramesi says he has no desire to dishonor McCain’s service, but he believes that celebrating the downed pilot’s behavior as heroic - “he wasn’t exceptional one way or the other” - has a corrosive effect on military discipline. “This business of my country before my life?” Dramesi says. “Well, he had that opportunity and failed miserably. If it really were country first, John McCain would probably be walking around without one or two arms or legs - or he’d be dead.”

  Once the Vietnamese realized they had captured the man they called the “crown prince,” they had every motivation to keep McCain alive. His value as a propaganda tool and bargaining chip was far greater than any military intelligence he could provide, and McCain knew it. “It was hard not to see how pleased the Vietnamese were to have captured an admiral’s son,” he writes, “and I knew that my father’s identity was directly related to my survival.” But during the course of his medical treatment, McCain followed through on his offer of military information. Only two weeks after his capture, the North Vietnamese press issued a report - picked up by The New York Times - in which McCain was quoted as saying that the war was “moving to the advantage of North Vietnam and the United States appears to be isolated.” He also provided the name of his ship, the number of raids he had flown, his squadron number and the target of his final raid.

  The Confession

  In the company of his fellow POWs, and later in isolation, McCain slowly and miserably recovered from his wounds. In June 1968, after three months in solitary, he was offered what he calls early release. In the official McCain narrative, this was the ultimate test of mettle. He could have come home, but keeping faith with his fellow POWs, he chose to remain imprisoned in Hanoi.

  What McCain glosses over is that accepting early release would have required him to make disloyal statements that would have violated the military’s Code of Conduct. If he had done so, he could have risked court-martial and an ignominious end to his military career. “Many of us were given this offer,” according to Butler, McCain’s classmate who was also taken prisoner. “It meant speaking out against your country and lying about your treatment to the press. You had to ‘admit’ that the U.S. was criminal and that our treatment was ‘lenient and humane.’ So I, like numerous others, refused the offer.”

  “He makes it sound like it was a great thing to have accomplished,” says Dramesi. “A great act of discipline or strength. That simply was not the case.” In fairness, it is difficult to judge McCain’s experience as a POW; throughout most of his incarceration he was the only witness to his mistreatment. Parts of his memoir recounting his days in Hanoi read like a bad Ian Fleming novel, with his Vietnamese captors cast as nefarious Bond villains. On the Fourth of July 1968, when he rejected the offer of early release, an officer nicknamed “Cat” got so mad, according to McCain, that he snapped a pen he was holding, splattering ink across the room.

  “They taught you too well, Mac Kane,” Cat snarled, kicking over a chair. “They taught you too well.”

  The brutal interrogations that followed produced results. In August 1968, over the course of four days, McCain was tortured into signing a confession that he was a “black criminal” and an “air pirate.” ”

  “John allows the media to make him out to be the hero POW, which he knows is absolutely not true, to further his political goals,” says Butler. “John was just one of about 600 guys. He was nothing unusual. He was just another POW.”

  McCain has also allowed the media to believe that his torture lasted for the entire time he was in Hanoi. At the Republican convention, Fred Thompson said of McCain’s torture, “For five and a half years this went on.” In fact, McCain’s torture ended after two years, when the death of Ho Chi Minh in September 1969 caused the Vietnamese to change the way they treated POWs. “They decided it would be better to treat us better and keep us alive so they could trade us in for real estate,” Butler recalls.

  By that point, McCain had become the most valuable prisoner of all: His father was now directing the war effort as commander in chief of all U.S. forces in the Pacific. McCain spent the next three and a half years in Hanoi biding his time, trying to put on weight and regain his strength, as the bombing ordered by his father escalated. By the time he and other POWs were freed in March 1973 as a result of the Paris Peace Accords, McCain was able to leave the prison camp in Hanoi on his own feet.

  Even those in the military who celebrate McCain’s patriotism and sacrifice question why his POW experience has been elevated as his top qualification to be commander in chief. “It took guts to go through that and to come out reasonably intact and able to pick up the pieces of your life and move on,” says Wilkerson, Colin Powell’s former chief of staff, who has known McCain since the 1980s. “It is unquestionably a demonstration of the character of the man. But I don’t think that it is a special qualification for being president of the United States. In some respects, I’m not sure that’s the kind of character I want sitting in the Oval Office. I’m not sure that much time in a prisoner-of-war status doesn’t do something to you. Doesn’t do something to you psychologically, doesn’t do something to you that might make you a little more volatile, a little less apt to listen to reason, a little more inclined to be volcanic in your temperament.”

  “A Bellicose Hawk”

  The reckless, womanizing hotshot who leaned on family connections for advancement before his capture in Vietnam emerged a reckless, womanizing celebrity who continued to pull strings. The real difference between the McCain of 1967 and the McCain of 1973 was that the latter’s ambition was now on overdrive. He wanted to study at the National War College - but military brass turned him down as underqualified. So McCain appealed the decision to the top: John Warner, the Secretary of the Navy and a friend of his father. Warner, who now serves in the Senate alongside McCain, overruled the brass and gave the POW a slot. McCain also got his wings back, even though his injuries prevented him from raising his hands above shoulder height to comb his own hair.

  McCain was eager to make up for lost time - and the times were favorable to a high-profile veteran willing to speak out in favor of the war. With the Senate moving to cut off funds for the Nixon administration’s illegal bombing of Cambodia, the president needed all the help he could get. Two months after his release, McCain related his harrowing story of survival in a 13-page narrative in U.S. News & World Report, at the end of which he launched into an energetic defense of Nixon’s discredited foreign policy. “I admire President Nixon’s courage,” he wrote. “It is difficult for me to understand ... why people are still criticizing his foreign policy - for example, the bombing in Cambodia.”

  In the years to come, McCain would continue to fight the war his father had lost. In his meetings with Nixon, Junior was known for chomping on an unlit cigar, complaining about the “goddamn gooks” and pushing to bomb enemy sanctuaries in Cambodia. His son was equally gung-ho. “John has always been a very bellicose hawk,” says John H. Johns, a retired brigadier general who studied with McCain at the War College. “When he came back from Vietnam, he accused the liberal media of undermining national will, that we could have won in Vietnam if we had the national will.”

  It was the kind of tough talk that made McCain a fast-rising star in far-right circles. Through Ross Perot, a friend of Ronald Reagan who had championed the cause of the POWs, McCain was invited to meet with the then-governor of California and his wife. Impressed, Reagan invited McCain to be the keynote speaker at his annual “prayer breakfast” in Sacramento.

  Then, at the end of 1974, McCain finally achieved the goal he had been working toward for years. He was installed as the commanding officer of the largest air squadron in the Navy - the Replacement Air Group based in Jacksonville, Florida - training carrier pilots. It was a post for which McCain flatly admits, “I was not qualified.” By now, however, he was unembarrassed by his own nepotism. At the ceremony commemorating his long-sought ascension to command, his father looking on with pride, McCain wept openly.

  Booze and Pork

  If heroism is defined by physical suffering, Carol McCain is every bit her ex-husband’s equal. Driving alone on Christmas Eve 1969, she skidded out on a patch of ice and crashed into a telephone pole. She would spend six months in the hospital and undergo 23 surgeries. The former model McCain bragged of to his buddies in the POW camp as his “long tall Sally” was now five inches shorter and walked with crutches.

  By any standard, McCain treated her contemptibly. Whatever his dreams of getting laid in Rio, he got plenty of ass during his command post in Jacksonville. According to biographer Robert Timberg, McCain seduced his conquests on off-duty cross-country flights - even though adultery is a court-martial offense. He was also rumored to be romantically involved with a number of his subordinates.

  In 1977, McCain was promoted to captain and became the Navy’s liaison to the Senate - the same politically connected post once occupied by his father. He took advantage of the position to buddy up to young senators like Gary Hart, William Cohen and Joe Biden. He was also taken under the wing of another friend of his father: Sen. John Tower, the powerful Texas Republican who would become his political mentor. Despite the promotion, McCain continued his adolescent carousing: On a diplomatic trip to Saudi Arabia with Tower, he tried to get some tourists he disliked in trouble with the authorities by littering the room-service trays outside their door with empty bottles of alcohol.

  As the Navy’s top lobbyist, McCain was supposed to carry out the bidding of the secretary of the Navy. But in 1978 he went off the reservation. Vietnam was over, and the Carter administration, cutting costs, had decided against spending $2 billion to replace the aging carrier Midway. The secretary agreed with the administration’s decision. Readiness would not be affected. The only reason to replace the carrier - at a cost of nearly $7 billion in today’s dollars - was pork-barrel politics.

  Although he now crusades against wasteful military spending, McCain had no qualms about secretly lobbying for a pork project that would pay for a dozen Bridges to Nowhere. “He did a lot of stuff behind the back of the secretary of the Navy,” one lobbyist told Timberg. Working his Senate connections, McCain managed to include a replacement for the Midway in the defense authorization bill in 1978. Carter, standing firm, vetoed the entire spending bill to kill the carrier. When an attempt to override the veto fell through, however, McCain and his lobbyist friends didn’t give up the fight. The following year, Congress once again approved funding for the carrier. This time, Carter - his pork-busting efforts undone by a turncoat Navy liaison - signed the bill.

  In the spring of 1979, while conducting official business for the Navy, the still-married McCain encountered Cindy Lou Hensley, a willowy former cheerleader for USC. Mutually smitten, the two lied to each other about their ages. The 24-year-old Hensley became 27; the 42-year-old McCain became 38. For nearly a year the two carried on a cross-country romance while McCain was still living with Carol: Court documents filed with their divorce proceeding indicate that they “cohabitated as husband and wife” for the first nine months of the affair.

  Although McCain stresses in his memoir that he married Cindy three months after divorcing Carol, he was still legally married to his first wife when he and Cindy were issued a marriage license from the state of Arizona. The divorce was finalized on April 2nd, 1980. McCain’s second marriage - rung in at the Arizona Biltmore with Gary Hart as a groomsman - was consummated only six weeks later, on May 17th. The union gave McCain access to great wealth: Cindy, whose father was the exclusive distributor for Budweiser in the Phoenix area, is now worth an estimated $100 million.

  McCain’s friends were blindsided by the divorce. The Reagans - with whom the couple had frequently dined and even accompanied on New Year’s holidays - never forgave him. By the time McCain became a self-proclaimed “foot soldier in the Reagan Revolution” two years later, he and the Gipper had little more than ideology to bind them. Nancy took Carol under her wing, giving her a job in the White House and treating McCain with a frosty formality that was evident even on the day last March when she endorsed his candidacy. “Ronnie and I always waited until everything was decided and then we endorsed,” she said. “Well, obviously, this is the nominee of the party.”

  The Carpetbagger

  As his marriage unraveled, McCain’s naval career was also stalling out. He had been passed over for a promotion. There was no sea command on the horizon, ensuring that he would never be able to join his four-star forefathers. For good measure, he crashed his third and final plane, this one a single-engine ultralight. McCain has never spoken of his last crash publicly, but his friend Gen. Jim Jones recalled in a 1999 interview that it left McCain with bandages on his face and one arm in a sling.

  So McCain turned to politics. Receiving advance word that a GOP congressional seat was opening up outside Phoenix, he put the inside edge to good use. Within minutes of the incumbent’s official retirement announcement, Cindy McCain bought her husband the house that would serve as his foothold in the district. In sharp contrast to the way he now markets himself, McCain’s campaign ads billed him as an insider - a man “who knows how Washington works.” Though the Reagans no longer respected him, McCain featured pictures of himself smiling with them.

  “Thanks to my prisoner-of-war experience,” McCain writes, “I had, as they say in politics, a good story to sell.” And sell it he did. “Listen, pal,” he told an opponent who challenged him during a candidate forum. “I wish I could have had the luxury, like you, of growing up and living and spending my entire life in a nice place like the first district of Arizona, but I was doing other things. As a matter of fact, when I think about it now, the place I lived the longest in my life was Hanoi.”

  To finance his campaign, McCain dipped into the Hensley family fortune. He secured an endorsement from his mentor, Sen. Tower, who tapped his vast donor network in Texas to give McCain a much-needed boost. And he began an unethical relationship with a high-flying and corrupt financier that would come to characterize his cozy dealings with major donors and lobbyists over the years.

  Charlie Keating, the banker and anti-pornography crusader, would ultimately be convicted on 73 counts of fraud and racketeering for his role in the savings-and-loan scandal of the 1980s. That crisis, much like today’s subprime-mortgage meltdown, resulted from misbegotten banking deregulation, and ultimately left taxpayers to pick up a tab of more than $124 billion. Keating, who raised more than $100,000 for McCain’s race, lavished the first-term congressman with the kind of political favors that would make Jack Abramoff blush. McCain and his family took at least nine free trips at Keating’s expense, and vacationed nearly every year at the mogul’s estate in the Bahamas. There they would spend the days yachting and snorkeling and attending extravagant parties in a world McCain referred to as “Charlie Keating’s Shangri-La.” Keating also invited Cindy McCain and her father to invest in a real estate venture for which he promised a 26 percent return on investment. They plunked down more than $350,000.

  McCain still attributes the attention to nothing more than Keating’s “great respect for military people” and the duo’s “political and personal affinity.” But Keating, for his part, made no bones about the purpose of his giving. When asked by reporters if the investments he made in politicians bought their loyalty and influence on his behalf, Keating replied, “I want to say in the most forceful way I can, I certainly hope so.”

  The Keating Five

  In congress, Rep. John McCain quickly positioned himself as a GOP hard-liner. He voted against honoring Martin Luther King Jr. with a national holiday in 1983 - a stance he held through 1989. He backed Reagan on tax cuts for the wealthy, abortion and support for the Nicaraguan contras. He sought to slash federal spending on social programs, and he voted twice against campaign-finance reform. He cites as his “biggest” legislative victory of that era a 1989 bill that abolished catastrophic health insurance for seniors, a move he still cheers as the first-ever repeal of a federal entitlement program.

  McCain voted to confirm Robert Bork and Clarence Thomas to the Supreme Court. In 1993, he was the keynote speaker at a fundraiser for a group that sponsored an anti-gay-rights ballot initiative in Oregon. His anti-government fervor was renewed in the Gingrich revolution of 1994, when he called for abolishing the departments of Education and Energy. The following year, he championed a sweeping measure that would have imposed a blanket moratorium on any increase of government oversight.

  In this context, McCain’s recent record - opposing the new GI Bill, voting to repeal the federal minimum wage, seeking to deprive 3.8 million kids of government health care - looks entirely consistent. “When jackasses like Rush Limbaugh say he’s not conservative, that’s just total nonsense,” says former Sen. Gary Hart, who still counts McCain as a friend.

  Although a hawkish Cold Warrior, McCain did show an independent streak when it came to the use of American military power. Because of his experience in Vietnam, he said, he didn’t favor the deployment of U.S. forces unless there was a clear and attainable military objective. In 1983, McCain broke with Reagan to vote against the deployment of Marine peacekeepers to Lebanon. The unorthodox stance caught the attention of the media - including this very magazine, which praised McCain’s “enormous courage.” It was the beginning of a beautiful friendship. McCain recognized early on how the game was played: The Washington press corps “tend to notice acts of political independence from unexpected quarters,” he later noted. “Now I was debating Lebanon on programs like MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour and in the pages of The New York Times and The Washington Post. I was gratified by the attention and eager for more.”

  When McCain became a senator in 1986, filling the seat of retiring Republican icon Barry Goldwater, he was finally in a position that a true maverick could use to battle the entrenched interests in Washington. Instead, McCain did the bidding of his major donor, Charlie Keating, whose financial empire was on the brink of collapse. Federal regulators were closing in on Keating, who had taken federally insured deposits from his Lincoln Savings and Loan and leveraged them to make wildly risky real estate ventures. If regulators restricted his investments, Keating knew, it would all be over.

  In the year before his Senate run, McCain had championed legislation that would have delayed new regulations of savings and loans. Grateful, Keating contributed $54,000 to McCain’s Senate campaign. Now, when Keating tried to stack the federal regulatory bank board with cronies, McCain made a phone call seeking to push them through. In 1987, in an unprecedented display of political intimidation, McCain also attended two meetings convened by Keating to pressure federal regulators to back off. The senators who participated in the effort would come to be known as the Keating Five.

  “Senate historians were unable to find any instance in U.S. history that was comparable, in terms of five U.S. senators meeting with a regulator on behalf of one institution,” says Bill Black, then deputy director of the Federal Savings and Loan Insurance Corporation, who attended the second meeting. “And it hasn’t happened since.”

  Following the meetings with McCain and the other senators, the regulators backed off, stalling their investigation of Lincoln. By the time the S&L collapsed two years later, taxpayers were on the hook for $3.4 billion, which stood as a record for the most expensive bank failure - until the current mortgage crisis. In addition, 20,000 investors who had bought junk bonds from Keating, thinking they were federally insured, had their savings wiped out.

  “McCain saw the political pressure on the regulators,” recalls Black. “He could have saved these widows from losing their life savings. But he did absolutely nothing.”

  McCain was ultimately given a slap on the wrist by the Senate Ethics Committee, which concluded only that he had exercised “poor judgment.” The committee never investigated Cindy’s investment with Keating.

  The McCains soon found themselves entangled in more legal trouble. In 1989, in behavior the couple has blamed in part on the stress of the Keating scandal, Cindy became addicted to Vicodin and Percocet. She directed a doctor employed by her charity - which provided medical care to patients in developing countries - to supply the narcotics, which she then used to get high on trips to places like Bangladesh and El Salvador.

  Tom Gosinski, a young Republican, kept a detailed journal while working as director of government affairs for the charity. “I am working for a very sad, lonely woman whose marriage of convenience to a U.S. senator has driven her to ... cover feelings of despair with drugs,” he wrote in 1992. When Cindy McCain suddenly fired Gosinski, he turned his journal over to the Drug Enforcement Administration, sparking a yearlong investigation. To avoid jail time, Cindy agreed to a hush-hush plea bargain and court-imposed rehab.

  Ironically, her drug addiction became public only because she and her husband tried to cover it up. In an effort to silence Gosinski, who was seeking $250,000 for wrongful termination, the attorney for the McCains demanded that Phoenix prosecutors investigate the former employee for extortion. The charge was baseless, and prosecutors dropped the investigation in 1994 - but not before publishing a report that included details of Cindy’s drug use.

  Notified that the report was being released, Sen. McCain leapt into action. He dispatched his top political consultant to round up a group of friendly reporters, for whom Cindy staged a seemingly selfless, Oprah-style confession of her past addiction. Her drug use became part of the couple’s narrative of straight talk and bravery in the face of adversity. “If what I say can help just one person to face the problem,” Cindy declared, “it’s worthwhile.”

  Favors for Donors

  In the aftermath of the Keating Five, McCain realized that his career was in a “hell of a mess.” He had made George H.W. Bush’s shortlist for vice president in 1988, but the Keating scandal made him a political untouchable. McCain needed a high horse - so his long-standing opposition to campaign-finance reform went out the window. Working with Russ Feingold, a Democrat from Wisconsin, McCain authored a measure to ban unlimited “soft money” donations from politics.

  The Keating affair also taught McCain a vital lesson about handling the media. When the scandal first broke, he went ballistic on reporters who questioned his wife’s financial ties to Keating - calling them “liars” and “idiots.” Predictably, the press coverage was merciless. So McCain dialed back the anger and turned up the charm. “I talked to the press constantly, ad infinitum, until their appetite for information from me was completely satisfied,” he later wrote. “It is a public relations strategy that I have followed to this day.” Mr. Straight Talk was born.

  Unfortunately, any lessons McCain learned from the Keating scandal didn’t affect his unbridled enthusiasm for deregulating the finance industry. “He continues to follow policies that create the same kind of environment we see today, with recurrent financial crises and epidemics of fraud led by CEOs,” says Black, the former S&L regulator. Indeed, if the current financial crisis has a villain, it is Phil Gramm, who remains close to McCain. As chair of the Senate Banking Committee in the late 1990s, Gramm ushered in - with McCain’s fervent support - a massive wave of deregulation for insurance companies and brokerage houses and banks, the aftershocks of which are just now being felt in Wall Street’s catastrophic collapse. McCain, who has admitted that “the issue of economics is not something I’ve understood as well as I should,” relies on Gramm to guide him.

  McCain also did his part to loosen regulations on big corporations. In 1997, McCain became chairman of the powerful Senate Commerce Committee, which oversees the insurance and telecommunications industries, as well as the CEO pay packages of those McCain now denounces as “fat cats.” The special interests with business before the committee were big and well-heeled. All told, executives and fundraisers associated with these firms donated $2.6 million to McCain when he served as the chairman or ranking member.

  The money bought influence. In 1998, employees of BellSouth contributed more than $16,000 to McCain. The senator returned the favor, asking the Federal Communications Commission to give “serious consideration” to the company’s request to become a long-distance carrier. Days after legislation benefiting the satellite-TV carrier EchoStar cleared McCain’s committee, the company’s founder celebrated by hosting a major fundraiser for McCain’s presidential bid.

  Whatever McCain’s romantic entanglements with the lobbyist Vicki Iseman, he was clearly in bed with her clients, who donated nearly $85,000 to his campaigns. One of her clients, Bud Paxson, set up a meeting with McCain in 1999, frustrated by the FCC’s delay of his proposed takeover of a television station in Pittsburgh. Paxson had treated McCain well, offering the then-presidential candidate use of his corporate jet to fly to campaign events and ponying up $20,000 in campaign donations.

  “You’re the head of the commerce committee,” Paxson told McCain, according to The Washington Post. “The FCC is not doing its job. I would love for you to write a letter.”

  Iseman helped draft the text, and McCain sent the letter. Several weeks later - the day after McCain used Paxson’s jet to fly to Florida for a fundraiser - McCain wrote another letter. FCC chair William Kennard sent a sharp rebuke to McCain, calling the senator’s meddling “highly unusual.” Nonetheless, within a week of McCain’s second letter, the FCC ruled three-to-two in favor of Paxson’s deal.

  Following his failed presidential bid in 2000, McCain needed a vehicle to keep his brand alive. He founded the Reform Institute, which he set up as a 501(c)(3) nonprofit - a tax status that barred it from explicit political activity. McCain proceeded to staff the institute with his campaign manager, Rick Davis, as well as the fundraising chief, legal counsel and communications chief from his 2000 campaign.

  There is no small irony that the Reform Institute - founded to bolster McCain’s crusade to rid politics of unregulated soft money - itself took in huge sums of unregulated soft money from companies with interests before McCain’s committee. EchoStar got in on the ground floor with a donation of $100,000. A charity funded by the CEO of Univision gave another $100,000. Cablevision gave $200,000 to the Reform Institute in 2003 and 2004 - just as its officials were testifying before the commerce committee. McCain urged approval of the cable company’s proposed pricing plan. As Bradley Smith, the former chair of the Federal Election Commission, wrote at the time: “Appearance of corruption, anyone?”

  “He Is Hotheaded”

  Over the years, John McCain has demonstrated a streak of anger so nasty that even his former flacks make no effort to spin it away. “If I tried to convince you he does not have a temper, you should hang up on me and ridicule me in print,” says Dan Schnur, who served as McCain’s press man during the 2000 campaign. Even McCain admits to an “immature and unprofessional reaction to slights” that is “little changed from the reactions to such provocations I had as a schoolboy.”

  McCain is sensitive about his physical appearance, especially his height. The candidate is only five-feet-nine, making him the shortest party nominee since Michael Dukakis. On the night he was elected senator in 1986, McCain exploded after discovering that the stage setup for his victory speech was too low; television viewers saw his head bobbing at the bottom of the screen, his chin frequently cropped from view. Enraged, McCain tracked down the young Republican who had set up the podium, prodding the volunteer in the chest while screaming that he was an “incompetent little shit.” Jon Hinz, the director of the Arizona GOP, separated the senator from the young man, promising to get him a milk crate to stand on for his next public appearance.

  During his 1992 campaign, at the end of a long day, McCain’s wife, Cindy, mussed his receding hair and needled him playfully that he was “getting a little thin up there.” McCain reportedly blew his top, cutting his wife down with the kind of language that had gotten him hauled into court as a high schooler: “At least I don’t plaster on the makeup like a trollop, you cunt.” Even though the incident was witnessed by three reporters, the McCain campaign denies it took place.

  In the Senate - where, according to former GOP Sen. Bob Smith, McCain has “very few friends” - his volcanic temper has repeatedly led to explosive altercations with colleagues and constituents alike. In 1992, McCain got into a heated exchange with Sen. Chuck Grassley over the fate of missing American servicemen in Vietnam. “Are you calling me stupid?” Grassley demanded. “No, I’m calling you a fucking jerk!” yelled McCain. Sen. Bob Kerrey later told reporters that he feared McCain was “going to head-butt Grassley and drive the cartilage in his nose into his brain.” The two were separated before they came to blows. Several years later, during another debate over servicemen missing in action, an elderly mother of an MIA soldier rolled up to McCain in her wheelchair to speak to him about her son’s case. According to witnesses, McCain grew enraged, raising his hand as if to strike her before pushing her wheelchair away.

  McCain has called Paul Weyrich, who helped steer the Republican Party to the right, a “pompous self-serving son of a bitch” who “possesses the attributes of a Dickensian villain.” In 1999, he told Sen. Pete Domenici, the Republican chairman of the Senate Budget Committee, that “only an asshole would put together a budget like this.”

  Last year, after barging into a bipartisan meeting on immigration legislation and attempting to seize the reins, McCain was called out by fellow GOP Sen. John Cornyn of Texas. “Wait a second here,” Cornyn said. “I’ve been sitting in here for all of these negotiations and you just parachute in here on the last day. You’re out of line.” McCain exploded: “Fuck you! I know more about this than anyone in the room.” The incident foreshadowed McCain’s 11th-hour theatrics in September, when he abruptly “suspended” his campaign and inserted himself into the Wall Street bailout debate at the last minute, just as congressional leaders were attempting to finalize a bipartisan agreement.

  At least three of McCain’s GOP colleagues have gone on record to say that they consider him temperamentally unsuited to be commander in chief. Smith, the former senator from New Hampshire, has said that McCain’s “temper would place this country at risk in international affairs, and the world perhaps in danger. In my mind, it should disqualify him.” Sen. Domenici of New Mexico has said he doesn’t “want this guy anywhere near a trigger.” And Sen. Thad Cochran of Mississippi weighed in that “the thought of his being president sends a cold chill down my spine. He is erratic. He is hotheaded.”

  McCain’s frequently inappropriate humor has also led many to question his self-control. In 1998, the senator told a joke about President Clinton’s teenage daughter at a GOP fundraiser. “Why is Chelsea Clinton so ugly?” McCain asked. “Because her father is Janet Reno!”

  More recently, McCain’s jokes have heightened tensions with Iran. The senator once cautioned that “the world’s only superpower ... should never make idle threats” - but that didn’t stop him from rewriting the lyrics to a famous Beach Boys tune. In April 2007, when a voter at a town-hall session asked him about his policy toward Tehran, McCain responded by singing, “bomb bomb bomb” Iran. The loose talk was meant to incite the GOP base, but it also aggravated relations with Iran, whose foreign minister condemned McCain’s “jokes about genocide” as a testament to his “disturbed state of mind” and “warmongering approach to foreign policy.”

  “Next up, Baghdad! ”

  The myth of John McCain hinges on two transformations - from pampered flyboy to selfless patriot, and from Keating crony to incorruptible reformer - that simply never happened. But there is one serious conversion that has taken root in McCain: his transformation from a cautious realist on foreign policy into a reckless cheerleader of neoconservatism.

  “He’s going to be Bush on steroids,” says Johns, the retired brigadier general who has known McCain since their days at the National War College. “His hawkish views now are very dangerous. He puts military at the top of foreign policy rather than diplomacy, just like George Bush does. He and other neoconservatives are dedicated to converting the world to democracy and free markets, and they want to do it through the barrel of a gun.”

  McCain used to believe passionately in the limits of American military power. In 1993, he railed against Clinton’s involvement in Somalia, sponsoring an amendment to cut off funds for the troops. The following year he blasted the idealistic aims of sending U.S. troops to Haiti, taking to the Senate floor to propose an immediate withdrawal. He even started out a fierce opponent of NATO air strikes on Serbia during the war in the Balkans.

  But such concerns went out the window when McCain began gearing up to run for president. In 1998, he formed a political alliance with William Kristol, editor of the neoconservative Weekly Standard, who became one of his closest advisers. Randy Scheunemann - a hard-right lobbyist who was promoting Iraqi exile Ahmad Chalabi - came aboard as McCain’s top foreign-policy adviser. Before long, the senator who once cautioned against “trading American blood for Iraqi blood” had been reborn as a fire-breathing neoconservative who believes in using American military might to spread American ideals - a belief he describes as a “sacred duty to suffer hardship and risk danger to protect the values of our civilization and impart them to humanity.” By 1999, McCain was championing what he called “rogue state rollback.” First on the hit list: Iraq.

  Privately, McCain brags that he was the “original neocon.” And after 9/11, he took the lead in agitating for war with Iraq, outpacing even Dick Cheney in the dissemination of bogus intelligence about the threat posed by Saddam Hussein. “There’s other organizations besides Mr. bin Laden who are bent on the destruction of the United States,” he warned in an appearance on Hardball on September 12th. “It isn’t just Afghanistan. We’re talking about Syria, Iraq, Iran, perhaps North Korea, Libya and others.” A few days later, he told Jay Leno’s audience that “some other countries” - possibly Iraq, Iran and Syria - had aided bin Laden.

  A month after 9/11, with the U.S. bombing Kabul and reeling from the anthrax scare, McCain assured David Letterman that “we’ll do fine” in Afghanistan. He then added, unbidden, “The second phase is Iraq. Some of this anthrax may - and I emphasize may - have come from Iraq.”

  Later that month on Larry King, McCain raised the specter of Saddam’s weapons of mass destruction before he peddled what became Dick Cheney’s favorite lie: “The Czech government has revealed meetings, contacts between Iraqi intelligence and Mohamed Atta. The evidence is very clear… . So we will have to act.” On Nightline, he again flogged the Czech story and cited Iraqi defectors to claim that “there is no doubt as to [Saddam’s] avid pursuit of weapons of mass destruction and the means to deliver them. That, coupled with his relations with terrorist organizations, I think, is a case that the administration will be making as we move step by step down this road.”

  That December, just as U.S. forces were bearing down on Osama bin Laden in Tora Bora, McCain joined with five senators in an open letter to the White House. “In the interest of our own national security, Saddam Hussein must be removed from power,” they insisted, claiming that there was “no doubt” that Hussein intended to use weapons of mass destruction “against the United States and its allies.”

  In January 2002, McCain made a fact-finding mission to the Middle East. While he was there, he dropped by a supercarrier stationed in the Arabian Sea that was dear to his heart: the USS Theodore Roosevelt, the giant floating pork project that he had driven through over President Carter’s veto. On board the carrier, McCain called Iraq a “clear and present danger to the security of the United States of America.” Standing on the flight bridge, he watched as fighter planes roared off, en route to Afghanistan - where Osama bin Laden had already slipped away. “Next up, Baghdad!” McCain whooped.

  Over the next 15 months leading up to the invasion, McCain continued to lead the rush to war. In November 2002, Scheunemann set up a group called the Committee for the Liberation of Iraq at the same address as Chalabi’s Iraqi National Congress. The groups worked in such close concert that at one point they got their Websites crossed. The CLI was established with explicit White House backing to sell the public on the war. The honorary co-chair of the committee: John Sidney McCain III.

  In September 2002, McCain assured Americans that the war would be “fairly easy” with an “overwhelming victory in

Nicolas Sarkozy veut diriger la zone euro jusqu’en 2010
LE MONDE | 22.10.08 | 10h26 •  Mis à jour le 22.10.08 | 11h12
Strasbourg, Paris, Bruxelles

D’une pierre deux coups. Nicolas Sarkozy veut profiter de la crise financière pour imposer sa vision économique de l’Europe et continuer à présider l’Union européenne (UE) au niveau de la zone euro, au moins pour une année supplémentaire. Le président français a amorcé cette offensive au Parlement européen, mardi 21 octobre. Elle a été confirmée au Monde par plusieurs conseillers de l’Elysée.
L’ambition de M. Sarkozy part d’un diagnostic partagé : les crises géorgienne et financière ont montré que l’Europe avait besoin d’une présidence forte pour exister : faute de quoi, il aurait été impossible de négocier avec Moscou sur la crise géorgienne ou de concocter un plan européen de sauvetage des banques. Le traité de Lisbonne n’étant pas entré en vigueur à cause du “non” irlandais, l’Europe ne disposera pas, comme prévu, d’un président stable du conseil, élu pour deux ans et demi. L’Union va continuer d’être dirigée au hasard des présidences semestrielles. Le 1er janvier 2009, elle se retrouvera dans les mains des eurosceptiques tchèques Vaclav Klaus et Mirek Topolanek, dans un pays en pleine crise gouvernementale, puis des Suédois, hors de l’euro.
Pour aggraver le tout, la Commission sera en fin de mandat, avant les élections européennes de juin 2009. Les circonstances seront peu propices à l’action. Le chef de l’Etat ne veut pas l’envisager : “Je ne laisserai pas revenir sur une Europe volontariste”, a-t-il insisté devant la presse.
M. Sarkozy a annoncé une feuille de route en décembre pour résoudre le problème de la présidence tournante. Faute de ratification irlandaise, il sera impossible d’agir au niveau des Vingt-Sept. Mais il est possible de contourner les Tchèques, puis les Suédois, en se réunissant au niveau des seize dirigeants de la zone euro, comme ce fut le cas dimanche 12 octobre, avant le Conseil européen.
M. Sarkozy a esquissé sa proposition devant le Parlement européen en expliquant que “la seule réunion des ministres des finances n’est pas à la hauteur de la gravité de la crise”. Les chefs d’Etat et de gouvernement étaient les seuls, selon lui, à pouvoir décider du plan de sauvetage des banques de 1 800 milliards d’euros, qui a constitué “un tournant dans cette crise”. La réunion périodique de cette instance constituerait un “gouvernement économique clairement identifié de la zone euro”.
RÉTICENCES DE L’ALLEMAGNE
L’Eurogroupe n’a aucune existence juridique et peut donc se doter d’une présidence sans traité institutionnel. La solution la plus audacieuse pour diriger ce forum consisterait à procéder à une élection. La seconde, plus simple, serait de décider que la France continue d’exercer la présidence au niveau de la zone euro, jusqu’à ce que la présidence de l’Union revienne à un pays ayant la monnaie unique, ce qui sera le cas le 1er janvier 2010, avec l’Espagne. Cette deuxième thèse semble naturelle au secrétaire d’Etat aux affaires européennes Jean-Pierre Jouyet, qui rappelle que les Belges ont dirigé un an l’Eurogroupe, en 2001, suppléant la présidence suédoise qui n’est pas dans l’euro. De même, les Grecs avaient remplacé en 2002 les Danois.
Le président ne serait autre que Nicolas Sarkozy, qui inviterait le premier ministre britannique, pour que la City, première place financière d’Europe, soit à bord. “Si l’on fait une élection, il faut un chef d’Etat leader et pas un chef d’Etat suiveur”, assure un conseiller de M. Sarkozy. Interrogé sur la candidature de Jean-Claude Juncker, premier ministre et ministre des finances luxembourgeois, qui préside l’Eurogroupe au niveau des ministres des finances, M. Sarkozy a répondu : “Bien sûr, pourquoi pas? Il faudra qu’on l’élise.”
Derrière des mots aimables, le président français ne veut pas de M. Juncker, dont il estime qu’il a fait preuve de peu d’initiative dans la crise financière, et dont il a critiqué le pays pour son opacité financière. Outre l’Eurogroupe, M. Sarkozy voudrait utiliser un argument analogue pour présider l’Union pour la Méditerranée jusqu’à ce que vienne le tour de l’Espagne : Suède et République tchèque ne sont pas riverains de la Méditerranée.
M. Sarkozy n’a pas prévenu Angela Merkel avant son discours. Il attend sa réaction. Il faudrait que la chancelière accepte des réunions au plus haut niveau de la zone euro, alors que l’Allemagne a toujours été réticente à un gouvernement économique. Et qu’elle dise oui à une présidence Sarkozy.

Cécile Chambraud, Arnaud Leparmentier et Philippe Ricard
http://www.lemonde.fr/la-crise-financiere/article/2008/10/22/nicolas-sarkozy-veut-diriger-la-zone-euro-jusqu-en-2010_1109655_1101386.html
- Sarkozy veut un gouvernement économique de la zone euro
La BCE «doit être indépendante» mais elle «doit pouvoir discuter avec un gouvernement économique», précise le chef de l’Etat.
40 réactions
Nicolas Sarkozy, aujourd’hui, au Parlement européen de Strasbourg. (REUTERS)
Le chef de l’Etat Nicolas Sarkozy a appelé ce matin à la création d’un «gouvernement économique clairement identifié» dans la zone euro, travaillant aux côtés de la BCE, à la lumière de la crise financière.

«Il n’est pas possible que la zone euro continue sans gouvernement économique clairement identifié», a-t-il déclaré devant le Parlement européen à Strasbourg.

«La Banque centrale européenne», seule institution fédérale de la zone euro à l’heure actuelle, «doit être indépendante» mais l’institut monétaire de Francfort, qui gère l’euro, «doit pouvoir discuter avec un gouvernement économique», a ajouté Nicolas Sarkozy.

Le Président a aussi indiqué qu’il allait proposer une réunion des chefs d’Etat et de gouvernement de l’UE pour préparer les sommets mondiaux sur la refonte du système financier international.

«J’aurai l’occasion de proposer à mes partenaires chefs d’Etat et de gouvernement une réunion pour préparer ces sommets», dont le principe a été accepté par les Etats-Unis le week-end dernier, a-t-il déclaré dans un discours devant le Parlement européen à Strasbourg.

L’Europe «doit porter l’idée d’une refondation du capitalisme mondial», a-t-il dit. «Ce qui s’est passé, c’est la trahison des valeurs du capitalisme, ce n’est pas une remise en cause de l’économie de marché», a ajouté Sarkozy.

Le chef de l’Etat français, qui préside l’UE, a indiqué que «la solution la plus simple» pour les sommets mondiaux serait d’associer les pays industrialisés du G8 aux cinq plus grandes économies émergentes comme la Chine et l’Inde.

Ce sera «tout l’objet du déplacement en Chine, pour convaincre les puissances asiatiques de participer à cette refondation», a-t-il dit, en référence au prochain sommet de l’Asem qui réunira 43 pays d’Europe et d’Asie à Pékin vendredi et samedi.
(Source AFP)

http://www.liberation.fr/politiques/0101163748-sarkozy-veut-un-gouvernement-economique-de-la-zone-euro
- Union européenne
Nicolas Sarkozy réveille l’Europe
Véronique Leblanc
Mis en ligne le 22/10/2008
A Strasbourg pour un “rapport d’étape” sur sa présidence, il défend l’idée d’un gouvernement économique face à la BCE. Les Européens ont montré leur unité dans la crise, assure-t-il. Il faut profiter de cet élan.

L’Europe existe, Nicolas Sarkozy l’a secouée. Si l’on doutait de la stature communautaire de l’homme lors de son élection à la présidence de la République française, force est de reconnaître qu’il a assumé avec efficacité la présidence du Conseil de l’Union européenne depuis juillet dernier. C’est un “rapport d’étape” qui l’a mené mardi matin à discourir devant les eurodéputés réunis en plénière strasbourgeoise. A son actif, la gestion de deux crises majeures : celle d’Ossétie en été et le “Big Bang” financier de ces dernières semaines ainsi que deux dossiers lourds : l’avenir du “Paquet énergie-climat” et celui du Pacte sur l’immigration.
“Nous avons voulu que l’Europe soit non seulement unie, a dit Nicolas Sarkozy, mais aussi indépendante - car le monde a besoin de la pensée de l’Europe - et volontariste, parce qu’il ne faut pas se contenter de dire.” Et de rappeler que, dès le 11 août, trois jours après le déclenchement du conflit en Ossétie, lui et son ministre des Affaires étrangères Bernard Kouchner étaient à Moscou pour convaincre d’un cessez-le-feu alors que début septembre, l’Union obtenait un retrait des forces armées.
“L’Europe a fait la paix - en admettant des compromis - et cela faisait longtemps qu’elle n’avait pas tenu un tel rôle”, a souligné Nicolas Sarkozy.
Mais l’essentiel de l’intervention du président en exercice de l’Union européenne fut son exposé sur la gestion de la crise financière “systémique, incroyable, invraisemblable” qui a commencé le 15 septembre avec la faillite de la banque américaine Lehman Brothers. Et d’évoquer les sommets européens, le plan Paulson II qui s’inspire largement de ceux-ci à la grande satisfaction de Nicolas Sarkozy : “La crise est mondiale; sa gestion doit être mondiale. La montre des Etats-Unis et celle de l’Europe doivent marquer la même heure”, a-t-il dit.
Mais la gestion ne suffit pas et c’est de refondation du capitalisme mondial qu’a parlé Nicolas Sarkozy. “Ce qui s’est passé, c’est la trahison de l’économie de marché par la spéculation. Aucune banque disposant d’argent de l’Etat ne devrait travailler avec des paradis fiscaux, les traders ne devraient pas être poussés à prendre des risques inconscients, les règles comptables ne devraient pas aggraver la crise financière”, a-t-il entre autres martelé. Il appelle de ses vœux un sommet qui inclurait notamment la Russie, la Chine et l’Inde.
Barroso se distancie
Lors d’une conférence de presse, Nicolas Sarkozy a par ailleurs évoqué la création d’un gouvernement économique de la zone euro capable de devenir un véritable pendant de la Banque centrale européenne (BCE). S’il a tenu à rendre hommage au gouverneur de celle-ci, Jean-Claude Trichet, il a souligné que “L’Europe a trouvé une réponse à la crise en réunissant les chefs d’Etat et de gouvernement de l’Eurogroupe et du Royaume Uni. Pourquoi ? Parce que tous ont admis l’idée d’une ‘boîte à outils’ commune pour y puiser afin d’aller dans le même sens. Nous avons fait une démonstration d’union aux Européens; ils n’accepteront plus de démonstration de désunion.”
Une position dont s’est démarqué le président de la Commission européenne José Manuel Barroso en estimant qu’il ne fallait pas que cela restreigne l’indépendance de la BCE. “Il ne faut pas créer l’illusion très dangereuse que l’idée serait de donner des instructions à la BCE”, a-t-il précisé.
Sauver le Plan climat
Derniers points à l’ordre du jour : le Pacte sur l’immigration qui ne fut que brièvement évoqué alors que l’importance du “Paquet énergie-climat” ne peut être sacrifiée à la gestion de la crise financière. “Si l’Europe n’est pas un exemple, elle ne sera pas entendue, a déclaré Nicolas Sarkozy, il est donc impératif de respecter les objectifs et le calendrier d’adoption du Plan climat.”
S’il parvient à le faire entériner lors du Conseil européen des 11 et 12 décembre, Nicolas Sarkozy pourra être légitimement fier de la présidence française de l’Union européenne au deuxième semestre 2008.

http://www.lalibre.be/actu/europe/article/454528/nicolas-sarkozy-reveille-l-europe.html

From The Times
October 20, 2008
Europe and US wrestle for control of global markets
Tom Baldwin in Washington
President Bush will host an emergency summit of leaders from the major economies to chart a new course for world finance amid signs that Europe and America appear intent on heading in different directions.
A weekend meeting at Camp David with President Sarkozy of France and José Manuel Barroso, the European Commission President, produced a joint statement promising to hold “a series of summits on addressing the challenges facing the global economy”. The first will be held soon after the US elections on November 4, when Mr Bush will still be President. He hopes to put his stamp on policies that will largely be implemented by either Barack Obama or John McCain after one of them is inaugurated on January 20.
Mr Bush said: “As we make the regulatory institutional changes necessary to avoid a repeat of this crisis, it is essential that we preserve the foundations of democratic capitalism — commitment to free markets, free enterprise and free trade.
“We must resist the dangerous temptation of economic isolationism and continue the policies of open markets that have lifted standards of living and helped millions of people escape poverty around the world.” But Mr Sarkozy, who holds the rotating presidency of the European Union, which has a tradition of deeper and stronger intervention in markets, advocated a new form of “regulated capitalism” because there is “no liberty without some regulation and stability”.
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He urged stiffer regulation of hedge funds and credit-rating companies while also saying that leaders should reconsider the rules governing tax havens such as the Cayman Islands and the relationship between world currencies such as the dollar and euro.
“We must reform capitalism so that the most efficient system ever created doesn’t destroy its own foundations,” he said. Although agreeing with Mr Bush that it would be “wrong — catastrophic — to challenge the foundations of market economics”, he added: “We cannot continue along the same lines, because the same problems will trigger the same disasters.”
Gordon Brown has said that the world’s top 30 banks should be under the supervision of a panel of regulators and wants a revamp of the International Monetary Fund, which was set up at Bretton Woods in 1944 to help struggling economies.
Mr Bush, however, has sought to wrest back control over the reform initiative, with the White House insisting that “the United States has committed to hosting the summit”.
The meetings would involve emerging economic powers previously excluded from similar talks, as well as those that have dominated the global financial system since the Bretton Woods deal. In addition to the G8, leading developing nations such as China, India and Brazil are likely to be invited, along with the likes of Saudi Arabia, South Korea and Australia.
The President-elect — Mr Obama or Mr McCain — will also be asked to attend.
http://business.timesonline.co.uk/tol/business/economics/article4974911.ece
Publié le 21/10/2008, à 12:25
Nicolas Sarkozy évoque la création de fonds souverains européens
Les Etats membres de l’Union européenne doivent réfléchir à la création de fonds souverains nationaux, qui pourraient se coordonner en temps de crise, estime Nicolas Sarkozy.
Les Etats membres de l’Union européenne doivent réfléchir à la création de fonds souverains nationaux, qui pourraient se coordonner en temps de crise, estime Nicolas Sarkozy.
Lors d’une allocution devant le Parlement européen, le chef de l’Etat français, qui préside l’UE jusqu’à fin 2008, a également renouvelé son appel à un gouvernement économique européen, qui puisse dialoguer avec la Banque centrale européenne (BCE).
“Les Bourses sont à un niveau historiquement bas. Je n’aimerais pas que les citoyens européens, dans quelques mois, se réveillent en découvrant que les sociétés européennes appartiennent à des capitaux non européens qui auraient acheté au plus bas du cours de Bourse, à vil prix (...) et les citoyens européens demanderaient alors : ‘qu’avez-vous fait ?’”, a lancé Nicolas Sarkozy.
“Eh bien moi je demande que chacun d’entre nous, nous réfléchissions à l’opportunité qu’il pourrait y avoir de créer nous aussi des fonds souverains dans chacun de nos pays et peut-être que ces fonds souverains nationaux pourraient de temps à autres se coordonner pour apporter une réponse industrielle à la crise”, a-t-il poursuivi.
Devant les parlementaires européens, le président français est également revenu sur l’idée d’un soutien européen au secteur automobile sur le Vieux Continent.
“L’Europe a besoin d’une industrie puissante et la présidence se battra pour cela”, a-t-il dit, quelques jours après avoir évoqué la possibilité pour les pays européens de mettre en place un plan d’aide à l’automobile similaire à celui de 25 milliards de dollars (18,6 milliards d’euros) décidé fin septembre aux Etats-Unis.
GOUVERNEMENT ÉCONOMIQUE EUROPÉEN
Autre demande de Nicolas Sarkozy formulée lors du Conseil européen de Bruxelles les 14 et 15 octobre et reprise dans l’hémicycle à Strasbourg, celle d’un gouvernement économique européen capable de devenir un véritable pendant de la BCE.
“Il n’est pas possible pour la zone euro de continuer sans un gouvernement économique clairement identifié”, a dit le chef de l’Etat, qui a par ailleurs rendu hommage au travail réalisé par l’institution dirigée par Jean-Claude Trichet.
“Ce gouvernement doit être au niveau des chefs d’Etat, les seuls ayant la légitimité démocratique nécessaire”, a-t-il ajouté, indiquant également qu’il n’était “pas raisonnable” que l’UE doive changer de président tous les six mois.
Le président français a aussi rappelé qu’il avait proposé la tenue d’un sommet sur un nouvel ordre financier international, dans lequel l’Europe devra porter “l’idée d’une refondation du capitalisme mondial”.
“Nous devons aussi porter l’idée d’une nouvelle régulation. Aucune banque ne travaillant avec de l’argent de l’Etat ne doit pouvoir travailler dans les paradis fiscaux”, a-t-il indiqué .
Il a ajouté qu’il espérait convaincre les puissances asiatiques, dont la Chine, d’y participer. “La crise est mondiale, la réponse doit être mondiale”, a dit Nicolas Sarkozy .
Les Etats-Unis, la France et l’Union européenne ont annoncé samedi une série de sommets sur la crise financière dont le premier pourrait se tenir peu après les élections américaines du 4 novembre.
Julien Toyer et Gilbert Reilhac
http://www.lexpress.fr/actualite/depeches/infojour/reuters.asp?id=80613
Nicolas Sarkozy veut un gouvernement économique pour la zone euro
-

LEMONDE.FR avec AFP | 21.10.08 | 11h53 •  Mis à jour le 21.10.08 | 15h17

A l’approche des sommets mondiaux sur la refonte du système financier international, Nicolas Sarkozy multiplie les initiatives et les propositions. Dernière en date, exprimée mardi 21 octobre devant le Parlement européen à Strasbourg, la création d’un “gouvernement économique” dans la zone euro, travaillant aux côtés de la Banque centrale européenne (BCE).
“Il n’est pas possible que la zone euro continue sans gouvernement économique clairement identifié”, a-t-il affirmé aux parlementaires strasbourgeois, arguant que si la BCE, seule institution fédérale de la zone euro à l’heure actuelle, “doit être indépendante”, elle “doit pouvoir discuter avec un gouvernement économique”.
Le président de la Commission européenne José Manuel Barroso a immédiatement pris ses distances avec cette proposition en estimant qu’il ne fallait pas que cela restreigne l’indépendance de la BCE. “A la Commission, nous sommes pour un renforcement de tous les mécanismes de coordination des politiques économiques des Etats européens. (...) En même temps, il ne faut pas créer l’illusion très dangereuse que [l’idée] serait de donner des instructions à la banque centrale”, a-t-il déclaré, soulignant l’importance, selon lui, de “ne pas mettre en cause l’indépendance de la banque centrale”.
En attendant de voir l’accueil réservé à sa proposition, Nicolas Sarkozy a proposé à ses homologues européens de se réunir pour préparer les sommets à venir sur la régulation du système financier. “L’Europe doit porter l’idée d’une refondation du capitalisme mondial”, a-t-il plaidé, annonçant son intention de se rendre en Chine, à l’occasion du sommet de l’ASEM (le forum Asie-Europe), qui réunira 43 pays vendredi et samedi à Pékin, “pour convaincre les puissances asiatiques de participer à cette refondation”.

http://www.lemonde.fr/la-crise-financiere/article/2008/10/21/nicolas-sarkozy-veut-un-gouvernement-economique-pour-la-zone-euro_1109278_1101386.html
- Politiques 21 oct. 11h27
Sarkozy veut un gouvernement économique de la zone euro
La BCE «doit être indépendante» mais elle «doit pouvoir discuter avec un gouvernement économique», précise le chef de l’Etat.
Le chef de l’Etat Nicolas Sarkozy a appelé ce matin à la création d’un «gouvernement économique clairement identifié» dans la zone euro, travaillant aux côtés de la BCE, à la lumière de la crise financière.

«Il n’est pas possible que la zone euro continue sans gouvernement économique clairement identifié», a-t-il déclaré devant le Parlement européen à Strasbourg.

«La Banque centrale européenne», seule institution fédérale de la zone euro à l’heure actuelle, «doit être indépendante» mais l’institut monétaire de Francfort, qui gère l’euro, «doit pouvoir discuter avec un gouvernement économique», a ajouté Nicolas Sarkozy.

Le Président a aussi indiqué qu’il allait proposer une réunion des chefs d’Etat et de gouvernement de l’UE pour préparer les sommets mondiaux sur la refonte du système financier international.

«J’aurai l’occasion de proposer à mes partenaires chefs d’Etat et de gouvernement une réunion pour préparer ces sommets», dont le principe a été accepté par les Etats-Unis le week-end dernier, a-t-il déclaré dans un discours devant le Parlement européen à Strasbourg.

L’Europe «doit porter l’idée d’une refondation du capitalisme mondial», a-t-il dit. «Ce qui s’est passé, c’est la trahison des valeurs du capitalisme, ce n’est pas une remise en cause de l’économie de marché», a ajouté Sarkozy.

Le chef de l’Etat français, qui préside l’UE, a indiqué que «la solution la plus simple» pour les sommets mondiaux serait d’associer les pays industrialisés du G8 aux cinq plus grandes économies émergentes comme la Chine et l’Inde.

Ce sera «tout l’objet du déplacement en Chine, pour convaincre les puissances asiatiques de participer à cette refondation», a-t-il dit, en référence au prochain sommet de l’Asem qui réunira 43 pays d’Europe et d’Asie à Pékin vendredi et samedi.
(Source AFP)

http://www.liberation.fr/politiques/0101163748-sarkozy-veut-un-gouvernement-economique-de-la-zone-euro
- Sarkozy veut unir l’Europe contre la crise
Rédaction en ligne
mardi 21 octobre 2008, 13:48
Le président en exercice de l’UE Nicolas Sarkozy a espéré devant le Parlement européen que la réforme de l’architecture financière qu’il prône concerne aussi les pays de l’Union européenne, y compris le Luxembourg. Il a aussi appelé à la création d’un « gouvernement économique clairement identifié » dans la zone euro.
Nicolas Sarkozy devant les eurodéputés. ©EPA
« Un gouvernement économique de la zone euro »
Devant les députés européens, le chef de l’Etat français a appelé à la création d’un « gouvernement économique clairement identifié » dans la zone euro, travaillant aux côtés de la BCE, à la lumière de la crise financière. « Il n’est pas possible que la zone euro continue sans gouvernement économique clairement identifié », a-t-il déclaré. « La Banque centrale européenne », seule institution fédérale de la zone euro à l’heure actuelle, « doit être indépendante » mais l’institut monétaire de Francfort, qui gère l’euro, « doit pouvoir discuter avec un gouvernement économique », a ajouté M. Sarkozy.
(afp)
« Je compte sur le soutien du Luxembourg pour que l’architecture financière soit profondément repensée, à l’extérieur de notre continent et à l’intérieur de notre continent, les deux », a répondu sous les applaudissements M. Sarkozy à une question du député socialiste luxembourgeois Robert Goebbels. « Ce n’est pas une critique, encore moins une attaque, c’est une simple remarque », s’est-il empressé d’ajouter.
« Comme l’a très bien dit (la députée française de centre-droit) Mme (Marielle) de Sarnez, on ne peut pas se battre à l’extérieur de notre continent contre certaines pratiques et les tolérer sur notre continent, c’est tout », a insisté le chef de l’Etat français.
« Que ceux qui se sentent visés assument. Moi je ne vise personne, je ne me le permettrais pas », a conclu Nicolas Sarkozy.
Membre fondateur du Groupe d’action financière sur le blanchiment des capitaux (Gafi), le Luxembourg n’est recensé par aucune organisation internationale qui mettent à l’index les paradis fiscaux. Les pratiques des sociétés financières qui y sont établies sont toutefois régulièrement épinglées, comme ce fut le cas dans l’affaire Clearstream.
Le président français a proposé un sommet extraordinaire des chefs d’Etat et de gouvernement de l’UE pour préparer les sommets mondiaux sur la refonte du système financier international, auxquels il veut associer les pays émergents.
« J’aurai l’occasion de proposer à mes partenaires chefs d’Etat et de gouvernement une réunion pour préparer ces sommets », dont le principe a été accepté par les Etats-Unis le week-end dernier, a-t-il déclaré dans un discours devant le Parlement européen à Strasbourg. Il n’a pas donné de détails sur la date ou le lieu de ce sommet préparatoire. L’Europe « doit porter l’idée d’une refondation du capitalisme mondial », a-t-il dit. « Ce qui s’est passé, c’est la trahison des valeurs du capitalisme, ce n’est pas une remise en cause de l’économie de marché », a ajouté M. Sarkozy. Le chef de l’Etat français, qui préside l’UE, a indiqué que « la solution la plus simple » pour les sommets mondiaux serait d’associer les pays industrialisés du G8 aux cinq plus grandes économies émergentes comme la Chine et l’Inde. Ce sera « tout l’objet du déplacement en Chine, pour convaincre les puissances asiatiques de participer à cette refondation », a-t-il dit, en référence au prochain sommet de l’Asem qui réunira 43 pays d’Europe et d’Asie à Pékin vendredi et samedi. « Avec le président (de la Commission européenne) José Manuel Barroso, nous allons nous rendre
en Chine, avec le but de convaincre la Chine et l’Inde de prendre part à ce sommet » sur la refondation du système financier international, a-t-il ajouté.
Les priorités de l’Europe lors des sommets mondiaux à venir seront « d’abord qu’aucune banque qui travaille avec l’argent des Etats ne puisse travailler avec des paradis fiscaux ». Il s’agira aussi de faire en sorte « qu’aucune institution financière ne puisse travailler sans être soumise à une régulation financière » et « que les traders voient leur système de rémunération calculés de façon à ne pas pousser à prise de risque inconsidérée », a dit M. Sarkozy.
Le chef de l’Etat français a aussi plaidé de nouveau pour que « le système monétaire soit repensé », en lançant une pique aux Etats-Unis régulièrement accusés de vivre à crédit du reste du monde du fait de l’importance du dollar. « Peut-on continuer nous (en Europe) à porter les déficits de la première puissance mondiale sans avoir un mot à dire ? la réponse est clairement non », a dit M. Sarkozy.
Il s’est prononcé en faveur de la création en Europe de fondssouverains, qui, coordonnés, permettraient « d’apporter une réponse industrielle à la crise » économique.
(afp)

http://www.lesoir.be/actualite/economie/sarkozy-voit-l-ue-refonder-le-2008-10-21-652527.shtml
- Des sommets contre à la crise
Rédaction en ligne
dimanche 19 octobre 2008, 09:39
Le président américain et les dirigeants européens se sont entendus samedi à Camp David pour proposer, face à la crise financière, non pas un seul, mais une série de sommets, dont le premier devrait avoir lieu en novembre aux Etats-Unis.
 
AFP
-
Le président américain et les dirigeants européens se sont entendus samedi à Camp David pour proposer, face à la crise financière, non pas un seul, mais une série de sommets, dont le premier devrait avoir lieu en novembre aux Etats-Unis.
Lors d’entretiens dans la retraite présidentielle des montagnes du Maryland (est), George W. Bush, son homologue français Nicolas Sarkozy et le président de la Commission européenne José Manuel Barroso sont convenus de consulter les autres dirigeants internationaux la semaine prochaine “avec l’idée de commencer une série de sommets pour répondre aux difficultés auxquelles est confrontée l’économie mondiale”, selon un communiqué de deux pays et de la Commission.
Le premier de ces sommets, au niveau des chefs de gouvernement, devrait énoncer les principes des réformes jugées nécessaires du système financier mondial pour éviter que la crise actuelle ne se reproduise. Les suivants serviraient à appliquer les mesures décidées.
Urgence, dit Sarkozy
Le premier sommet aurait lieu aux Etats-Unis “peu après les élections américaines” du 4 novembre, dit le communiqué.
Selon un porte-parole de la Maison Blanche, Tony Fratto, “on peut raisonnablement s’attendre” à ce que le sommet se tienne en novembre, comme le demandait M. Sarkozy, venu avec M. Barroso pousser M. Bush au nom des Européens à accepter une vaste réforme du système financier mondial.
Avant environ trois heures d’entretiens et à l’occasion de brèves déclarations conjointes devant la presse, M. Sarkozy, dont le pays exerce la présidence tournante de l’Union européenne, avait à nouveau affirmé l’urgence d’une conférence internationale.
“Pourquoi il faut aller vite ? Il faut aller vite parce qu’il faut rapidement stabiliser les marchés et trouver des réponses et il ne faut surtout pas que, le jour où le calme sera revenu, les mêmes refassent, dans les mêmes conditions, ce qu’ils ont fait avant”, a lancé M. Sarkozy, dénonçant les fonds d’arbitrage et les paradis fiscaux.
Il avait aussi de nouveau préconisé que le sommet se tienne à New York, là où, fait-il valoir, la crise a commencé.
Quelle réforme ?
Face à des Européens qui se flattent d’avoir pour une fois coordonné leur action et exercé un véritable leadership face à la crise, M. Bush a conservé aux Américains leur part d’initiative en offrant, devant MM. Sarkozy et Barroso, d’accueillir la conférence sur le sol des Etats-Unis.
Les déclarations de Camp David ne semblent pas répondre, cependant, à la question sur l’ampleur d’une réforme. Les Européens veulent une réforme réelle et complète, une sorte de nouveau Bretton Woods, du nom des accords qui gouvernent depuis 1944 la finance internationale. Ils proposent une forme de supervision mondiale des marchés, qui pourrait échoir au Fonds monétaire international.
Si le président français à proposé de construire “le capitalisme de l’avenir”, M. Bush a répété qu’il était “essentiel que nous préservions les fondements du capitalisme démocratique”.
M. Sarkozy a reconnu que M. Bush avait “raison de dire que la remise en cause de l’économie de marché serait une catastrophe”.
“Mais on ne peut pas non plus continuer avec les mêmes causes qui produiront les mêmes effets. L’économie de marché a besoin de règles”, a-t-il lancé.
Un sommet ne suffirait pas
M. Fratto, porte-parole à la Maison Blanche, a expliqué que si MM. Bush, Sarkozy et Barroso proposaient une série de sommets, c’est parce que le nombre des problèmes, leur étendue et le nombre de pays concernés font qu’il est “trop ambitieux” de penser que cela puisse être réglé en un seul sommet.
M. Fratto a relevé que beaucoup de gens parlaient, pour l’ordre financier international, d’une nouveau Bretton Woods, la conférence de 1944 qui a fondé le système actuel: “Bretton Woods a duré trois semaines et a impliqué 44 pays, à une époque où il y avait moins de pays dans le monde”, a-t-il dit.
(D’après AFP)

http://www.lesoir.be/actualite/monde/des-sommets-contre-a-la-crise-2008-10-19-651739.shtml
- comission européenne
Barroso prend ses distances avec Sarkozy
afp
Mis en ligne le 21/10/2008

Le président de la Commission européenne José Manuel Barroso a pris mardi ses distances avec l’idée française d’un gouvernement économique de la zone euro, en estimant qu’il ne fallait que cela restreigne l’indépendance de la Banque centrale européenne (BCE).
“A la Commission, nous sommes pour un renforcement de tous les mécanismes de coordination des politiques économiques des Etats européens”, a-t-il déclaré lors d’une conférence de presse au Parlement européen de Strasbourg, aux côtés du chef de l’Etat français Nicolas Sarkozy.
“En même temps, il ne faut pas créer l’illusion très dangereuse que (l’idée) serait de donner des instructions à la Banque centrale”, a-t-il ajouté, car il est important de “ne pas mettre en cause l’indépendance de la Banque centrale”.
Tirant les leçons de la crise financière, M. Sarkozy avait auparavant plaidé avec force devant le Parlement européen pour la création d’un véritable gouvernement économique de la zone euro, au niveau des chefs d’Etat et de gouvernement, en complément de la Banque centrale européenne.
Les réunions de la zone euro ne se déroulent jusqu’ici, chaque mois, qu’au niveau des ministres des Finances.
M. Sarkozy a évoqué lors de la conférence de presse la possibilité de nouvelles réunions des chefs d’Etat de la zone euro à l’avenir, après celle, sans précédent, du 12 octobre à Paris qui a permis de mettre au point un plan européen coordonné de sauvetage des banques.
Il a également indiqué que ce nouveau forum pourrait avoir un président en la personne du Premier ministre et ministre des Finances luxembourgeois Jean-Claude Juncker, qui dirige déjà le forum des ministres des Finances de la zone euro.
Dans le passé, l’Allemagne n’a pas caché ses réticences à l’égard d’un gouvernement économique de la zone euro, car elle y voit une tentative française de faire de l’ombre à la BCE et à son indépendance.

http://www.lalibre.be/actu/europe/article/454345/barroso-prend-ses-distances-avec-sarkozy.html
- Crise financière
Medvedev accuse les Etats-Unis de “fautes graves”
AFP
Mis en ligne le 21/10/2008
Début octobre, le président russe avait déjà critiqué les Etats-Unis en évoquant la crise financière mondiale.
Le président russe, Dmitri Medvedev, a accusé mardi les Etats-Unis d’avoir commis des “fautes graves” qui font payer aux autres pays les conséquences de la crise financière mondiale, lors d’une visite en Arménie, alliée fidèle de Moscou dans le Caucase.
“Nous payons pour les fautes graves commises par certains Etats, avant tout les Etats-Unis”, a déclaré M. Medvedev lors d’une conférence de presse à Erevan, à l’issue d’une rencontre avec son homologue arménien, Serge Sarkissian. Les décisions prises en Russie contre la crise sont “suffisantes”, mais “cela ne veut pas dire qu’on en restera là”, a-t-il souligné. Touchée par la crise, Moscou a annoncé plusieurs séries de mesures pour venir en aide en particulier à son secteur bancaire, en panne de liquidités, mais aussi aux autres entreprises et à son marché boursier, en pleine déroute depuis septembre.
Début octobre, le président russe avait déjà critiqué les Etats-Unis en évoquant la crise financière mondiale. “L’ère de la domination d’une économie et d’une devise a été reléguée au passé une bonne fois pour toutes”, avait-il dit. Le président Medvedev a par ailleurs appelé l’Arménie à coordonner sa politique étrangère avec Moscou. “Je suis sûr que les actions coordonnées sur la scène internationale sont un facteur important de la sécurité et du renforcement de nos positions dans le Caucase et dans le monde”, a déclaré M. Medvedev.
La visite de M. Medvedev intervient après celles du sous-secrétaire d’Etat américain pour l’Europe et l’Eurasie, Daniel Fried, et du représentant de l’Otan dans le Caucase du Sud, Robert Simons. M. Fried avait souligné que la guerre russo-géorgienne en août et la reconnaissance par Moscou de deux territoires géorgiens pro-russes avait mis en exergue les dangers des différends non résolus dans le Caucase. Il avait appelé vendredi l’Arménie et l’Azerbaïdjan à résoudre “aussi vite que possible” le conflit qui les oppose au sujet de la région du Nagorny Karabakh.
M. Medvedev a pour sa part annoncé une rencontre des présidents arménien, azerbaïdjanais et russe qui pourrait avoir lieu “très prochainement” en Russie pour discuter du Karabakh. “J’espère qu’une rencontre des trois présidents aura lieu très prochainement pour trouver une solution au problème” du Karabakh, province séparatiste azerbaïdjanaise peuplée majoritairement d’Arméniens, a déclaré M. Medvedev.
“J’espère qu’elle aura lieu en Russie”, a-t-il poursuivi. “L’Arménie est prête à poursuivre des négociations sur la base des principes de Madrid”, qui reconnaissent “le droit du peuple du Karabakh à l’autodétermination”, a déclaré le président arménien. “La question peut être résolue sur la base d’un compromis et par la voie des négociations”, a-t-il poursuivi.
La Russie a fait pression ces dernières semaines sur l’Arménie pour qu’elle débloque cette situation, afin de sortir de son isolement. Le président azerbaïdjanais, Ilham Aliev, a promis le 13 octobre de renforcer l’isolement de l’Arménie, tant qu’elle ne renoncera pas à l’“occupation” du Nagorny Karabakh. Dans un effort pour apaiser les tensions, le président turc, Abdullah Gül, a effectué début septembre une visite historique en Arménie à l’occasion d’un match de football.
Ankara, qui a des liens étroits avec l’Azerbaïdjan turcophone, a fermé sa frontière avec l’Arménie en 1993, après le conflit sur le Nagorny-Karabakh, dont la sécession a conduit à la guerre, qui a fait près de 30.000 morts. La Turquie n’entretient pas de relations diplomatiques avec Erevan en raison de divergences sur la façon de qualifier les massacres d’Arméniens (pour Erevan, il s’agit d’un génocide) commis en 1915-17 en Anatolie.

http://www.lalibre.be/actu/europe/article/454350/medvedev-accuse-les-etats-unis-de-fautes-graves.html

Lorsqu’un travail sérieux est soumis à de fortes contraintes matérielles ça lui donne, à mes yeux, une urgence et un éclat particuliers.

Mais tout a une limite et il faut quelque moyen pour produire, j’en sais quelque chose également, j’espère que vous atteindrez votre objectif de financement, de nos jours où la pauvreté intellectuelle est érigée en grandeur, un travail comme le votre qui “casse la tête”, qui fait réfléchir est salubre.

Côté britannique il n y a pas vraiment eu de rupture avec le néolibéralisme, mais une trahison, assez stupéfiante d’ailleurs de par sa célérité, des valeurs néo-libérales, une trahison des Etats-Unis en somme qui représentent ce système néolibérale.

La rupture peut advenir si la crise se creuse, devient sans retour, mais la trahison peut redevenir fidélité si les choses allaient mieux.

Ce manque de constance des Britanniques peut être interprété comme étant la représentation de leur sens pratique, mais un pays qui est prêt à se renier si rapidement perd inévitablement de son influence auprès des autres.

The Social Sources of Financial Power: Domestic Legitimacy And International Financial Orders
Cornell University Press (mai 2006)

“Seabrooke argues convincingly that if a state’s credit policies at home are unstable, then that state cannot seriously affect the global financial order.”-Mark Blyth, Johns Hopkins University

Book Description
A state’s financial power is built on the effect its credit, property, and tax policies have on ordinary people: this is the key message of Leonard Seabrooke’s comparative historical investigation, which turns the spotlight away from elite financial actors and toward institutions that matter for the majority of citizens. Seabrooke suggests that everyday contests between social groups and the state over how the economy should work determine the legitimacy of a state’s financial and fiscal system. Ideally, he believes, such contests compel a state to intervene on behalf of people below the median income level, leading the state to broaden and deepen its domestic pool of capital while increasing its influence on international finance. But to do so, Seabrooke asserts, a state must first challenge powerful interests that benefit from the concentration of financial wealth.
Seabrooke’s novel constructivist approach is informed by economic sociology and the work of Max Weber. This book demonstrates how domestic legitimacy influences the character of international financial orders. It will interest all readers concerned with how best to transform state intervention in the economy for the good of the majority.

http://www.amazon.fr/Social-Sources-Financial-Power-International/dp/0801443806

The Multipolar Financial World

Posted on Tuesday, October 7th, 2008
By Heidi Crebo-Rediker, Co-Director GSFI, New America Foundation
To Sebastian’s original forum question: is there a relationship between the financial turmoil and US power. The answer has to be yes – for both internal and external reasons.
The internal reasons are more obvious: a strong economy is critical to the ability of the US to lead, to fund national security needs, and to generate public support for any truly necessary engagement abroad to protect national security interests. This crisis has a ways to play out with consequences to the US economy ranging from bad to catastrophic (with other countries now facing similar prophesies). A home-first bias will temper foreign aid programs, just at a time when a cash rich beneficiaries of this decade’s wealth transfer out of the US are able to use financial clout for foreign aid programs or even as outright foreign policy tools. Heading deeper into debt (increasing dependence on Chinese, Japanese, Russian… reserves) could potentially limit our foreign objectives as well (see Brad’s excellent Sovereign Wealth piece).

The external impact of this crisis on US power has yet to play out, but early warning signals are not good. Over the past few years, one could count on Putin to rave about revising the world’s financial architecture (US at the center) to benefit the emerging world economic powers. We counted on a rising China buying into a legacy system it benefited from and not rocking the boat. Now we hear from friends and foes that the time to rebuild the entire financial and monetary system of the world has come. Today we focus on saving the global banking system, but after the dust settles, real questions will emerge about free-market capitalism and the role of the state (not least of which will be because the UST will rival ADIA in assets under management). It would be naïve to write this one off as a bubble born of a perfectly fine free market system – back to business as usual in a year - in the eyes of the rest of the world.

I’ve heard the combination of Iraq and the current meltdown described as the one-two punch for American military and economic power. I’d say there was one further blow delivered – to democracy in action.
In the school of lead by example - the eyes of the world watched US leadership flail while the global free-market ship was sinking: a powerless US President, a Treasury Secretary down on his knees to make his case for saving the system (with not the perfect, but at least some plan), a bickering, divided, Congress perilously dragging out the crisis for two weeks over ideology and local politics. While Rome was burning around the globe, Congress finally came together when earmarks were dished out to pass the Bill.

Autocracy gained big points here. Research analysts and foreign press buzzed about Russia handling this crisis better than the US because it took decisive action. We have yet to recognize the profound impact this, combined with loss of faith in the US financial and free-market system, made on every country deciding whether our way was is the right way to go. The US spent decades selling (and shedding blood) for democracy and capitalism. We’ve lost legitimacy in this crisis – there will be consequences for US power.
On the dollar question - I am in the camp that believes that for now, the US dollar’s reserve currency role will be maintained, for lack of a credible alternative. Hopefully so, in any case, as Moody’s made clear that the US AAA rating depends on “the ability of the US to maintain confidence in the dollar as a global reserve and transaction currency.” As for the EUR, the Eurozone is proving itself a fair-weather arrangement - even less up to the task of stabilizing the financial system than the US. China is years away from taking a leadership role re: currency and the Asian Currency Unit looks highly unrealistic. Stephen Jen of Morgan Stanley writes most convincingly of why the USD will remain dominant hegemonic reserve currency and Brad Setser described above why reasons of absolute reserve growth needing an investment home support the dollar’s position. But reserve currencies don’t last forever, such that it becomes a matter of time (5, 10, 25 years?) before we see another currency (or financial product representing either a currency basket or commodity basket) either replace the dollar, or at least become its equal. I think the crisis accelerated that time line: major government holders of dollars will unlikely see dollar hegemony as (relatively) benign, and US global financial leadership as something they can depend on and healthy for the home team. On the flip side, the dollar as a store of value has clearly benefited dollar holders short-term in the flight to quality.

As to Peer Steinbrueck’s warning - the financial world went multi-polar several years ago. Of course the US will remain one of the central poles of global finance (one of several superpowers), but before the crisis, NY and London were neck and neck for number one. Roger Kubarych makes some good points about US financial markets competitiveness in addressing the Steinbrueck question, but I’m sure he knows that London completely trounced the US in OTC derivatives and FX most of this decade (we trounced London in securitization – oh well) and we’re losing rapid market share in public equity markets (2008 saw 0 of the top 20 IPOs listed in the US). As for English language and ability to work with counterparts, firms and individuals from different cultures, London wins. Sebastian’s cluster argument holds for London too - financial innovation was booming pre-crisis, driven in part because the foreign quant population was unable to get US visas and/or work permits. In any case, we were well on the multi-polar path in finance pre-crisis. Give Singapore or HK a decade and they might be in the running for equal footing with London and NY. Complacency is our worst enemy here and the crisis certainly doesn’t help the US (or London for that matter).
As we (and the world) move on from this financial storm, we’ll find America is in a different place than we began in this century.
This entry was posted on Tuesday, October 7th, 2008 at 3:28
http://blogs.cfr.org/forum/2008/10/07/the-multipolar-financial-world/

Financial Leadership, the Missing Ingredient
By Rick Wartzman, New America Foundation
BusinessWeek | October 15, 2008

As the financial crisis went from bad to worse last week, policymakers and business executives fussed and fretted over the drying up of credit around the world. The bigger problem, though, is a severe shortage of something else entirely: leadership. Peter Drucker—who began writing on the topic in the 1940s, long before it became fashionable—considered true leaders those who bring accountability, consistency, and a sharp sense of what must be accomplished to all they do. When it comes to the current mess, those in charge on Wall Street and in Washington have failed to deliver on all three fronts.
Most appalling, perhaps, were the performances on Capitol Hill by the former heads of Lehman Brothers and American International Group, who blamed devious short-sellers, unpredictable regulators, and careless colleagues for their firms’ woes—just about everybody, that is, but themselves. “Looking back on my time as CEO,” Robert Willumstad, AIG’s former chief, told a House oversight committee, “I don’t believe AIG could have done anything differently.”
The Height of Prudence?
Richard Fuld, who presided over the downfall of Lehman, told the panel that all of his decisions “were both prudent and appropriate” given the information he had at the time. Yet if this is true, it indicates that his organization was ill-equipped to get him the information he required—a horrendous management breakdown in and of itself.
“Harry Truman’s folksy ‘The buck stops here’ is still as good a definition as any” of leadership, Drucker wrote in his 1967 classic, The Effective Executive. Willumstad and Fuld made a mockery of the buck-stops-here standard.
Meantime, public officials haven’t displayed many exemplary leadership qualities, either. “The leader’s first task is to be the trumpet that sounds a clear sound,” Drucker wrote. “Effective leadership—and again this is very old wisdom—is not based on being clever; it is based primarily on being consistent.”
But clarity and consistency have been largely absent from the government’s response to the crisis. At first, the Bush Administration had an awful time explaining why its $700-billion rescue plan wasn’t simply a taxpayer-funded bailout for the companies responsible for the disaster. And all along, the Administration’s efforts have seemed haphazard and uncertain, as if it isn’t exactly sure what notes on the trumpet it should try to play. At one point, for example, Treasury officials belittled the idea of the government taking an ownership stake in the nation’s banks. Then they reversed course and announced Tuesday that they’d invest $250 billion in the sector.
Their action helped spur a stock-market rally after shares were completely battered last week. But it remains to be seen whether the government’s plan is even focused on the right things. It’s quite possible, after all, that it could succeed in shoring up the banking system in the short term while neglecting to ensure that another financial meltdown doesn’t materialize down the line.
One of the most serious issues that hasn’t been adequately addressed, for instance, is mandating that financial institutions divulge precisely what kinds of risks they face today and going forward.
“There have been lots of halfhearted attempts at improving this over the years, most of them driven by big credit or trading losses, concerns about systemic stability or damage to clients,” Merrill Lynch veteran Erik Banks wrote in his disturbingly prescient 2004 book The Failure of Wall Street: “Something bad happens, regulators ask for more risk information, banks produce it for a while, no one finds it particularly useful because it is couched in such oblique terms that nothing is actually conveyed, and then it gets buried in unreadable form in the financial statement footnotes; regulators, clients, and investors forget about it, and it’s back to the status quo till the next blowup.”
This time, we must do better—but that calls for leaders who have the courage to treat not only the current calamity but also its underlying causes, including a lack of transparency.
Expanding the Boundaries
Indeed, the way Drucker saw it, one of a leader’s most important jobs is to frame carefully what he or she hopes to accomplish with every major decision. “What are the objectives the decision has to reach?” Drucker wrote. “What are the minimum goals it has to attain? What are the conditions it has to satisfy?”
Drucker pointed out that in science, these are known as “boundary conditions.” And falling short of them can be dire. “A decision that does not satisfy the boundary conditions,” Drucker asserted, “is worse than one which wrongly defines the problem.”
He recounted that President Roosevelt expanded his own boundary conditions after the “sudden economic collapse” between the summer of 1932 and the spring of 1933. Earlier, Roosevelt had pursued a relatively conservative policy of economic recovery. But when the situation deteriorated, his goal necessarily became not just recovery but comprehensive reform.
It is a path we’d be wise to walk again. The question is, will anyone provide the leadership to take us there?
Copyright 2008, BusinessWeek

http://www.newamerica.net/publications/articles/2008/financial_leadership_missing_ingredient_8168

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L’Europe impose sa méthode à Bush
OuvertureCapitalisme. Un premier sommet international se tiendra aux Etats-Unis en novembre.

6 réactions
ALEXANDRA SCHWARTZBROD

S’il n’y avait eu le nuage Strauss-Kahn pour voiler le paysage, Nicolas Sarkozy aurait pu savourer à fond son été indien. Le projet qu’il proposait dès mercredi au sommet européen a été accepté sans barguigner, samedi à Camp David (Maryland), par un président américain considérablement affaibli par cette crise financière planétaire partie des Etats-Unis. Et aussi par l’impitoyable montée en puissance des démocrates dans le pays.

Perfidie.George Bush a donc dit OK à toutes les propositions, ou presque, faites dans sa résidence par le chef de l’Etat français et le président de la commission européenne, José Manuel Barroso. Les Européens veulent organiser un sommet mondial sur la crise financière ? Qu’à cela ne tienne, on va même en monter plusieurs. Avant la fin de l’année, afin que Sarkozy puisse y officier en tant que président de l’Union européenne ? Pas de problème, le premier de ces sommets devrait même se tenir peu après les élections américaines du 4 novembre. Et tout ça aux Etats-Unis, «là où tout a commencé», comme le plaidait avec un rien de perfidie le président français ? Rien de plus naturel, a estimé Bush qui, par ce biais, peut laisser à penser que les Etats-Unis gardent un minimum d’initiative : le premier sommet devrait donc se tenir à New York, non loin de Wall Street. Le secrétaire général de l’ONU, Ban Ki-moon, a même offert d’accueillir les grands de ce monde au siège de l’ONU, sur les bords de l’East River, dans les salons du domino géant érigé après la Seconde Guerre mondiale à l’est de Manhattan. Ce qui redonnerait un peu de lustre à l’institution.

Pour Nicolas Sarkozy, ces sommets devraient impérativement réunir les pays du G8 élargis aux cinq pays émergents que sont la Chine, l’Inde, le Brésil, le Mexique et l’Afrique du Sud, ainsi qu’«un pays arabe». Un geste dont les Occidentaux peuvent difficilement faire l’économie. Mercredi, réunis en sommet à New Delhi, l’Inde, le Brésil et l’Afrique du Sud avaient fustigé les pays riches pour avoir provoqué, selon eux, la crise financière mondiale qui menace aujourd’hui leur développement. La liste des participants sera sans doute arrêtée dans les jours qui viennent lors des multiples entretiens que les dirigeants européens doivent lancer sur le sujet.

Tout cela reste de la forme. Qu’en est-il du fond, et surtout de cette vaste «refondation du système capitaliste» que Sarkozy appelle de ses vœux ? Sur ce point, Bush s’est fait moins coulant, répétant qu’il est «essentiel de préserver les fondements du capitalisme démocratique», c’est-à-dire le capitalisme actuel. Mais le président américain n’aura plus guère d’influence après le 4 novembre et son successeur ne sera pas encore aux affaires puisqu’il prendra ses fonctions en janvier. Ce qui marque, peut-être, les limites de l’exercice.

Concrètement, le premier de ces sommets devrait énoncer les principes des réformes du système financier mondial nécessaires pour éviter une nouvelle crise. Ainsi, la lutte contre les paradis fiscaux, qui sera au menu d’une réunion internationale demain à Paris, à l’initiative de Paris et Berlin. Les suivants serviraient à appliquer les mesures décidées.

Malaise. L’UE veut une réforme profonde, une sorte de Bretton Woods bis, du nom des accords de 1944 qui avaient jeté les bases d’un nouveau système financier. Les Européens proposent notamment une supervision mondiale des marchés, qui serait confiée au Fonds monétaire international (FMI). D’où le malaise suscité ce week-end par la mise en cause de Dominique Strauss-Kahn, dont la candidature à la tête du FMI, il y a un an, avait été portée à bout de bras par Sarkozy (lire aussi p. 2 et 3). Des incertitudes qui ne devraient guère contribuer à calmer la volatilité des marchés.
http://www.liberation.fr/economie/0101163368-l-europe-impose-sa-methode-a-bush

Comment reagiriez vous a une donation venant d’un acteur institutionel d’un pays non aligne..? Chavez en a soutenu de plus gros que DeDefensa :-)

Quel titre ! Cela sonnerait parfaitement pour un album de Blake & Mortimer, nos deux heros du virtualisme anglo americain.

Plus serieusement, j’ai le sentiment que Gorbatchev n’a fait qu’avoir le courage de dire politiquement ce que la realite criait aux oreilles de la nation Russe. Avait il le choix de faire autrement? Probablement pas.
A t’il ete encourage dans sa demarche par un mouvement patriotiste Russe travaillant contre l’URSS pour la sauvegarde de la Russie..? Je veux le croire.
Si Obama a le choix lui, de rester muet, alors l’hypothese Gorbatchev ne sera pas la sienne. Il ne semble pas avoir le pouvoir de s’opposer au systeme americaniste. Ce dernier est plus fort et plus radical que ne l’etait le systeme soviestique.
Le grande question est: y a t’il un mouvement patriotiste US travaillant contre le systeme americaniste pour la sauvegarde de la nation americaine..?
Ou sont les realistes..?