Once again the Bush administration is floating on a wave of euphoria. Israel’s offensive against Hezbollah in Lebanon has liberated the utopian strain of neoconservatism that had been traduced by Iraq’s sectarian civil war. And the Secretary of State, Condoleezza Rice, has propelled herself forward as chief cheerleader.
United States President George W Bush was against diplomacy before he was for it. But with the collapse of US foreign policy from the Middle East to North Korea he has claimed to have become a born-again realist. ”And it’s, kind of … painful .. for some to watch, because it takes a while to get people on the same page,” he said at his July 7 press conference.
Months before an air strike killed Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, United States military commanders and intelligence officers in Iraq tried to persuade the office of the Defence Secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, and the White House to ”degrade” his inflated image; they resisted, ultimately for ”domestic political reasons”, as a military source told me.
No image available
/ 8 September 2005
Biblical in its uncontrolled rage and scope, the storm has left millions of Americans to scavenge for food and shelter, and hundreds reportedly dead. With its main levee broken, the evacuated city of New Orleans has become part of the Gulf of Mexico. But the damage wrought by Hurricane Katrina may not entirely be the result of an act of nature, but Bush administration’s policies and actions.
United States President George Bush’s drive for absolute power has momentarily stalled. In a single coup, he planned to take over all the institutions of government. By crushing the traditions of the Senate he would pack the courts, especially the supreme court, with lockstep ideologues.
The United States Senate intelligence committee report is the Da Vinci code of the Iraq war. Some of the clues are in plain sight but unless one knows how to read them they remain cryptic. Deletions, covering one-fifth of the report, and omissions, stretching endlessly, are as significant as what’s included.
For decades, Donald Rumsfeld has had a reputation as a great white shark of the bureaucratic seas: sleek, fast-moving and voracious. But now the United States defence secretary has a new war on his hands — the country’s officer corps has turned on the government.
One year after George W Bush’s triumphant May Day landing on the deck of the USS Lincoln and appearance behind a ”Mission Accomplished” sign, his splendid little war has entered a Stalingrad-like phase of urban siege and house-to-house combat. For those who backed Bush over war in Iraq, the idea of proof has shifted from fact to fervour.
No image available
/ 2 February 2004
For the first time, the United States is hearing sustained criticism of its president and, though the Democratic presidential primaries have been going less than two weeks, the effect has been immediate. The remaining Democratic hopefuls are all singing from the same hymn sheet to defeat George W Bush.