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Wednesday, September 10, 2008 |
WashingtonPost: "An intelligence forecast being prepared for the next president on future global risks envisions a steady decline in U.S. dominance in the coming decades, as the world is reshaped by globalization, battered by climate change, and destabilized by regional upheavals over shortages of food, water and energy.
The report, previewed in a speech by Thomas Fingar, the U.S. intelligence community's top analyst, also concludes that the one key area of continued U.S. superiority - military power - will 'be the least significant' asset in the increasingly competitive world of the future, because 'nobody is going to attack us with massive conventional force'.
He saw U.S. leadership eroding 'at an accelerating pace' in 'political, economic and arguably, cultural arenas'.
In the new intelligence forecast, it is not just the United States that loses clout. Fingar predicts plummeting influence for the United Nations, the World Bank and a host of other international organizations that have helped maintain political and economic stability since World War II. It is unclear what new institutions can fill the void, he said.
In the years ahead, Washington will no longer be in a position to dictate what new global structures will look like. Nor will any other country, Fingar said.
Fingar predicted steady progress in the Islamic republic's attempts to create enriched uranium, the essential fuel used in nuclear weapons and commercial power reactors. For now, however, there is no evidence that Iran has resumed work on building a weapon, Fingar said, echoing last year's landmark National Intelligence Estimate on Iran, which concluded that warhead-design work had halted in 2003."
AlterNet: "The United States is in a huge foreign policy muddle in the Middle East. It wants to dominate and control Iran but requires the support of the world community to accomplish its aims. Diplomacy and sanctions require only a low level of support. On the other hand, to launch a military attack or green-light one by Israel, the United States needs far more backing.
This support does not appear to exist, and recent U.S. foreign policy actions are eroding that support even further. The Israeli newspaper Haaretz reported on August 13 that the United States refused to give the go-ahead to Israeli attacks on Iran's nuclear facilities in talks between Secretary of Defense Robert Gates and Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak. Could it be that the Bush administration finally knows when it is licked?
Israeli officials acknowledge that it would be difficult to launch such an attack without approval from Russia, China, and India, something that the United States would have to lobby those nations to achieve. The chances at present are extremely slim that any of the three will acquiesce.
U.S. condemnation of Russia's military action to defend the breakaway region of South Ossetia, combined with the determination of the Bush administration to install missile systems in Poland and the Czech Republic, virtually guarantee that Russia will not do anything to help the United States foment more violence in its neighborhood.
Beijing owns much of the U.S. debt, continues to be one of Tehran's largest trade partners, and is not about to be dictated to by Washington. India has defied the United States by entering into a pipeline deal with Iran. Exhaustive three-year nuclear treaty negotiations between the United States and India are utterly stalled. If the treaty is not presented to Congress in September, it will be dead.
Russia and China have repeatedly said that they see no nuclear weapons danger in Iran. Besides the tension over the pending treaty with the United States, India has little to say, since it is not a signatory to the Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty, as Iran is. The skepticism of these nations is yet another reason why support for an Iranian attack is evaporating."
IHT: "Georgia is to blame for initiating last month's war with Russia, former German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder said Tuesday as he criticized Western policy toward Russia.
Western policies are making Russia feel encircled, he told an investment conference in Kazakhstan's commercial capital, Almaty.
'Such a policy must seem to Russia like encirclement,' Schroeder said. 'We find ourselves in a spiral of confrontation that we need to get out of as quickly as possible.'
Schroeder said Europe needed to maintain a healthy partnership with Russia."
10:41:05 AM 
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TonyBlairFaithFoundation: "The Tony Blair Faith Foundation has discovered that a group of individuals are falsely representing themselves as working on behalf of the Tony Blair Faith Foundation."
Tony Blair would also like to state that the Tony Blair who led the UK government was a fraud and bears no resemblance to the Tony Blair that he really is. He also denies ever having been a member of New Labour.
10:22:58 AM
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© Copyright 2008.
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