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je rajoute un autre commentaire: l’inflation des dépenses oblige à un serrage de vis des budgets. Cela pose un double-problème:

- l’amputement des marges externes (appartenant au budget du pentagone ou de différents services secrets, notamment) nécessaires à la pérpetuation des projets secrets, coeur de la stratégie militaire US.

- soulève la question de réévaluer les dépenses de l’IRAQ à la baisse, ou en tout cas de modérer le train fictif de dépenses actuel. Fictif? Avec la sémantique de ce site, on dirait plutôt virtualiste. Mais ce serait vraiment trop la mise en abime! Je me fais comprendre. Pour 87 milliards budgetés et disons 100 dépensés. Sur ce total, 35 serviront réellement aux lignes inscrites dans le budget, 15 correspondront à des dépassements permettant de financer des black programs, et 50 iront dans la poche des partenaires, financiers et autres corrompus/corrupteurs, par le biais de cascades de marges de prestataires construits en sociétés poupées russes auto-gonflantes et multi-encastrables (des logiciels conçoivent et démêle des montages structurels aptes à réaliser ce genre d’opérations).

210 milliards, ce sont les dotations particulières. Une partie non négligeable là bas du budget de l’armée US qui est pour info de l’ordre de 350 ou 400 milliards de dollars annuel.. Sans compter tous les investissements privés et collatéraux: mercenaires des sociétés pétrolières, industrielles + services secrets etc. C’est tout simplement monstrueux le fric investit là bas. Mais honnêtement, tout le monde s’en fout. Les américains sont no more concerned des sous “américains” dépensés. Les seuls sous qui comptent, sont ceux de la spéculation sur les retombées économiques de leurs actes, et ça, même si ça ne rapporte pas fondamentalement plus, ça profite superbement à un petit nombre qui se repêtra d’autant plus gloutonnement du gaspillage réalisé avec l’argent public. Et disons le même simplement, de l’asservissement par strates de leurs gentils citizen.

he oui, et même si ça pétait grave là bas, ça ne changerait pas l’axe de l’opinion: s’il y a gouvernement, manifestants, c’est une démocratie. sécuritairement insalubre, mais une magnifique démocratie plein d’un formidable goût de voter (parce que ne l’oublions pas: c’est ça la démocratie).

j’ignore ce qu’est votre groupe “Defensa” mais je lis régulièrement vos articles avec grand intérêt : noter l’absence (significative) de la Russie (rien à voir avec l’orthodoxie) et de la Chine qui a fait célébrer des offices funèbres par son Église officielle ! cel aprête à réfléchir : effectivement nous sommes à un tournant, dangereux comme tel ! meilleurs sentiments…

2 commentaires:
1) Notre civilisation occidentale vit dans une aversion grandissante du risque. Au nom du principe de précaution, on nous obligera bientôt à mourir de faim plutôt que d’avaler de la nourriture non certifiée. Cette aversion du risque est encore bien plus grande de l’autre côté de l’Atlantique. Elle est en soi indicatrice et génératrice de décadence, mais aussi génératrice de violence: pour éviter le risque, on est prêt à tout, y compris détruire l’Irak.
2) Partenariat Europe/Chine: de Gaulle nous parlait de l’Europe de l’Atlantique à l’Oural: il avait peut-être les idées un peu courtes. Je me réfère aux théories géostratégiques de Mackinder (disponible sur stratisc.org). La perspective d’une alliance continentale Europe-Chine est la principale menace à long terme pour la puissance des Etats-Unis. Dans un cycle précédent, la discorde France-reste du continent fut longtemps la ligne directrice fondamentale de l’Angleterre, pour les mêmes raisons: la puissance maritime dominante devient “irrelevante” (comme disent nos amis anglo-saxons) en cas de concorde continentale: en effet, les communications terrestres deviennent possibles, sont plus rapides et plus directes que par voie maritime et la maîtrise des mers n’apporte plus qu’un avantage marginal.
La Chine essaie de développer les communications terrestres (initiatives sur la nouvelle route de la soie par chemin de fer, par exemple). Je me demande si la constante de la politique US depuis la fin de la guerre froide n’est pas d’entretenir les tensions au centre de l’Eurasie afin d’empêcher la réalisation de leur pire cauchemar: Canton-Hambourg via le centre de l’Europe (toutes les voies physiques existent) plutôt que via le détroit de la Sonde et le Cap de Bonne Espérance.

“Le constat doit être fait que la religion, sous tous ses aspects, est impliquée, de force s’il le faut, dans l’immense débat idéologique, politique et stratégique déclenché par l’activisme belliciste des Etats-Unis.”
Nil novum sub sole. Religion et Politique ont toujours été intimement mêlées. Voter étonnement m’étonne…
Ou bien vous êtes vraiment naïf et mal informé (ce qui m’étonnerait) ou alors vous essayez de faire passer un message entre les lignes. J’estime beaucoup votre site, et vous nous avez habitué à éviter la langue de bois. Qu’avez vous vraiment voulu dire?

Votre optimisme est un peu prématuré. À mon avis, les Britanniques essayent de mieux contrôler l’Europe en se posant comme défenseurs d’Airbus. Attention à la méprise

bravo..

Bravo pour “de defensa” qui fait amende honorable quant au “populisme” de Chavez.

Bravo à Federico, qui laisse entendre qu’un superétat fédéral ferait le jeu des USA.

Un bémol : ce serait vrai dans le cas d’une Europe giscardienne.
Mais on peut écrire une autre constitution, plus claire, surtout plus nette,
et non basochienne comme celle qu’on veut nous imposer sous la menace d’un chaos en cas d’échec du oui, qui est
digne de Croquemitaine.

Au sujet de l’excellent analyse du Dr. Weinstein sur le bolivarisme de M. Chavez, il faut remarquer la très utile synthèse de l’auteur de l’article.

Chavez utilise une combinaison de moyens: sur le plan économique, un “mix” de nationalisation, participation et “tolérance” de l’initiative privée. Sur le plan géopolitique, il réaffirme la souveraineté nationale du Vénézuéla tout en primant pour la formation d’un bloc sud-américain d’Etats coopérants.

Or, cela est d’après moi la seule solution réaliste pour mettre en place des blocs de puissance alternatifs aux USA. Des “super-états” fédéraux comme l’on hypotise ici en Europe (par des gens comme J. Delors ou V. Giscard d’Estaing) signifie jouer en faveur de Washington: l’on crée des macro-régions favorables à la liberté des capitaux et on met en place des souverainetés faibles (Commission, Parlement, Etats nationaux, etc.).

Un souverainisme intélligent est en revanche celui de Chavez. Il rappelle sous certains aspects un “gaullisme sociale”, d’ailleurs.

Qu’en pensent les lecteurs de “De Defensa”?

merci

Voici un rapport de “Strategic Forecasting”, dirigé par M. George Friedman, sur des récentes découvertes des services de reinseignements allemands et israéliens:

“Europe faces potential attack threats from European-looking Islamist
militants. Sources in German intelligence and the Israeli government say the
militants in question, Muslim Albanians from Kosovo’s Orahovac region, are
getting advanced training in Kosovo.

The information, if correct, suggests that a certain group of international
militant Islamists have developed an intricate global network, operating
basic training camps on the Afghan-Pakistani border and advanced training
programs in the Balkans—where they are relying on the advanced skills of
combat-tested veterans from the Chechen and Iraqi wars. This particular
network, according to the sources, aims to conduct operations in Europe and
Israel, though other similar networks also likely exist in Germany and North
America. It is unclear whether such networks are linked to each other—or
to al Qaeda.”

L’on se demande donc: la guerre meurtrière contre la Serbie en 1999 ne devait-elle pas “sécuriser” la région? C’était en tous cas ce que l’on nous raccontait… Evidemment, selon les interets américains, tout peut changer… combattre les “jihadistes” en Afghanistan mais les pousser aux Balkans…

la morale de l histoire resterait toujours la meme..

washington declanche des guerres a la legere, malgre le manque de serieux de ses informations.

ce qui n a rien de reluisant.

bien sur comme vous le faites remarquer cela n est que fallacieux puisque la facon de faire venait directement de cheney rumsteack & co.

April 1, 2005
NEWS ANALYSIS
A Final Verdict on Prewar Intelligence Is Still Elusive
By TODD S. PURDUM
ASHINGTON, March 31 - It found no evidence that intelligence had been politically twisted to suit preconceptions about Iraq’s unconventional weapons programs, and made no formal judgments about how top policy makers had used that intelligence to justify war. Yet in its own way, the presidential commission on intelligence left little doubt that President Bush and his top aides had gotten what they wanted, not what they needed, when they were told that Saddam Hussein had a threatening arsenal of illicit weapons.

“It is hard to deny the conclusion that intelligence analysts worked in an environment that did not encourage skepticism about the conventional wisdom,” the commission said. But that understated indictment is about the extent of the commission’s effort to explain the responsibilities of the nation’s highest officials for one of the worst intelligence failures of modern times.

So the latest and presumably the last official review of such questions leaves unresolved what may be the biggest question of all: Who was accountable, and will they ever be held to account for letting what amounted to mere assumptions “harden into presumptions,” as Judge Laurence H. Silberman, chairman of the commission, put it.

A full accounting awaits the work of historians. But already some people have been judged, albeit it indirect ways, while others have been rewarded, even promoted. Some who foresaw potential disaster were punished or pushed aside, while the president and vice president were given new terms.

President Bush’s election-year order creating the commission (and a schedule that assured it would report well after the election) did not authorize it to investigate how policy makers had used the intelligence they received. In the end, the commission reserved by far its sharpest criticism for the agencies that provided the intelligence, blaming them over and over again in its 601-page unclassified report for “poor tradecraft and poor management.”

By comparison, the commission made a tantalizing but oblique reference to the president. It came in a passage criticizing the vaunted President’s Daily Brief, the super-secret intelligence document that Mr. Bush and his predecessors have received each morning, complaining that its “attention-grabbing headlines and drumbeat of repetition” left misleading impressions, and no room for shadings. “In ways both subtle and not so subtle, the daily reports seemed to be ‘selling’ intelligence,” the commission found, “in order to keep its customers, or at least the First Customer, interested.”

The clearest casualties of the Iraq intelligence failures - and the most direct targets of the commission - were the top leaders of the C.I.A., beginning with George J. Tenet, who resigned as director of central intelligence last summer in the face of rising criticism. President Bush later awarded him the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

After he left, Mr. Tenet’s top leadership team was effectively replaced by his designated successor, Porter J. Goss. Among those to go were Mr. Tenet’s deputy, John McLaughlin; James L. Pavitt and Stephen R. Kappes, top officials in the agency’s clandestine service; and Jami Miscik, the deputy director for intelligence.

The old C.I.A. leadership is portrayed by the commission as either troublingly unaware or disturbingly dismissive of deep concerns within the agency that the principal source of prewar intelligence about Mr. Hussein’s chemical and biological weapons programs was reported to have problems with drinking, reliability and truthfulness. At the same time, warnings unnamed analysts within the agency who questioned this information before the war were disregarded. Others who sought after the invasion to correct the informant’s lies were branded as troublemakers and pushed out of their jobs, the commission found.

President Bush himself has never publicly blamed anyone in his administration, and some officials intimately involved in the review and public discussion of prewar intelligence including Condoleezza Rice, now secretary of state, and Stephen J. Hadley, now national security adviser, have since been promoted. Others, like Paul D. Wolfowitz, the former deputy defense secretary and now president of the World Bank, have been publicly praised and rewarded.

Senator Bill Frist of Tennessee, the Republican majority leader, called the report “a forceful reminder of the need to transform America’s intelligence community to improve intelligence collection, analysis and dissemination, including its communication to policy makers.”

Former Senator Bob Graham, the Florida Democrat who was one of the few leaders in either party before the war to vigorously and publicly question the administration’s assertions about Iraq’s capacities, was considerably more critical.

“Thus far, this administration has been characterized by a stunning amount of indifference to what has occurred,” he said, adding: “This administration has held nobody accountable for anything, unless you count Tenet’s resignation. Of course, he then turned around and received the nation’s highest civilian award. They have been less than fully cooperative with the nonexecutive agencies which have attempted to find out what happened. It’s inexplicable to me, at a pure level of management, why the administration has not held people accountable.”

That is arguably so. But there may be another measure. With the exception of Mr. Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney and Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, there has now been considerable turnover in many of the administration officials most involved with prewar intelligence. At the Pentagon, Douglas J. Feith, the under secretary for policy who was deeply involved in intelligence matters, is leaving to return to private life soon.

While acknowledging the intelligence agencies’ past success maintaining the status quo, the commission’s co-chairman, former Senator Charles Robb, Democrat of Virginia, said the shifts in leadership that had already occurred, including Mr. Bush’s nomination of John D. Negroponte to be the first director of national intelligence, meant it would be “a whole lot easier to instigate change.”

Mr. Robb said that the commission had kept an open hot line for complaints, and “ran to ground” every report or rumor that came its way about potential political interference with intelligence-gathering and analysis, including reports that some C.I.A. analysts felt pressured by Mr. Cheney’s repeated personal visits to the agency. But he said it had found “absolutely no instance” of anyone reporting pressure to change a position.

For his part, Judge Silberman noted that the C.I.A. and other intelligence agencies had vigorously disputed any suggestion of a link between Mr. Hussein and Al Qaeda, but had not resisted the consensus opinion that Iraq had unconventional weapons. “They pushed that position,” he said of the intelligence agencies, but were “absolutely uniform and uniformly wrong.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/04/01/politics/01policy.html?th&emc=th

La grande erreur de vos analyses c’est que vous assimiler les opinions britanniques à l’ensemble de l’Europe: Il n’y a vraiment pas de distinctions sufisantes entre les deux côtés de l’Atlantique. J’espère que vous allez changer ce parti-pris afin que nous profitions de vos brillantes intuitions

Greece sails past EU target on deficit
By Graham Bowley International Herald Tribune Saturday, March 19, 2005
Berlusconi bristles at idea that Italy might miss mark, too Greece recorded a budget deficit of 6.1 percent of gross domestic product in 2004, official figures showed Friday, the biggest deficit in percentage terms of a European Union country since the introduction of the single currency in 1999.The Italian deficits in 2003 and 2004 could also be revised above the 3 percent limit of the battered EU Stability and Growth Pact, according to Eurostat, the EU statistics agency. The overshoots come before what is likely to be a fractious meeting of European governments in Brussels on Sunday, when finance ministers will try to agree to rework the pact amid widespread flouting of the rules by several EU countries. The doubt cast on Italy’s economy drew a blistering response from Silvio Berlusconi, Italy’s prime minister, who has been among the vanguard of EU nations seeking to relax the rules. Berlusconi said he would contest Eurostat’s figures. “We’re pretty tired of all this bureaucracy,” Berlusconi said in Rome, Reuters reported. “We are really determined to do battle over this because Europe’s job should not be to create difficulties for member states, but precisely the opposite.” The pact’s rules were put in place at the end of the last decade, largely at Germany’s insistence. They were meant to underpin public confidence in Europe’s fledgling currency by restricting countries’ freedom to run up large budget deficits. Germans were afraid that traditionally high-spending countries like Italy or Greece would undermine the stability they enjoyed under the Deutsche mark. But Germany, which has broken the 3 percent cap outlined in the pact for the past three years, is now leading a group of countries, including France, to weaken the rules by introducing a list of mitigating factors that would allow a country to escape punishment. Chancellor Gerhard Schröder of Germany said during a visit to Vienna on Friday that the new pact should put more emphasis on economic growth. “Stability is important, but growth is at least as important,” he said, according to Reuters. A meeting of finance ministers broke up in acrimony this month as they argued over the list of mitigating factors. Germany wants to be excused the massive payments it has made to support the former East Germany since reunification in 1990. France has wanted to leave out spending on defense and on research. Italy wants to exempt infrastructure. Britain, which does not participate in the euro currency, also wants to limit the powers of the European Commission to enforce sanctions on countries. But these moves have been resisted by fiscal disciplinarians like Austria and the Netherlands, as well as some of the new EU nations of Eastern Europe, which fear the relaxation of the rules could fatally undermine the euro before they can join. A decision on reform requires unanimity among all 25 EU nations. This week, Luxembourg, which holds the EU rotating presidency, floated a compromise to break the deadlock, in which countries could draw up their own list of special factors they could use to avoid sanctions if they broke the limit. This approach would represent a severe watering down of the pact compared with the strict rules put in place in the late 1990s. But the new figures could undermine the efforts of some EU countries to relax the rules, economists said. “These figures will add a little bit of weight to the argument that discipline is needed and should be applied with some severity,” Nicolas Sobczak, an economist at Goldman Sachs in Paris, told Bloomberg. Greece’s budget deficit was sharply higher than the government’s own estimate of 5.3 percent, although the figure could be revised still higher, Eurostat said. Questions remain about Greece’s spending on the Olympics, unpaid bills by hospitals and on the government’s accounting for payments to and from the EU central budget. The Greek government promised Friday to work with the European Union “in a framework of transparency” to fix the public accounts. “This is the heritage of fiscal disorder the Socialist governments left behind,” the Finance Ministry said in a statement in Athens. The ill will between countries could spill over into a meeting of EU heads of state and government in Brussels on Tuesday and Wednesday. EU leaders are hoping to focus on broader attempts to revitalize Europe’s slow-growing economies. They will try to restart the stalled Lisbon Agenda, an EU policy began five years ago that was aimed at making Europe the world’s most competitive economy by 2010. But one of the centerpieces of the new agenda, a directive to open up the EU market in services, has come under severe attack in the past few weeks. Countries like France and Germany have criticized it. They fear it will lead to social dumping. This would involve companies from low-cost countries in Eastern Europe undermining higher standards of social protection in western member states. This week Jaques Chirac, the French president, said the services directive was “unacceptable.” A demonstration against the services proposal, involving thousands of protesters, is expected in Brussels on Saturday. José Manuel Barroso, the European Commission president, called Friday for renewed political commitment to revive the EU reforms and boost the popularity of the Union. “What has been missing is a lack of sufficient political drive and commitment in many of our member states,” Barroso said in a speech in Poland. Carter Dougherty contributed reporting from Frankfurt.

http://www.iht.com/articles/2005/03/18/business/euro.html