U.S.: The Politics of Pushback

On Veterans' Day, Nov. 11, President Bush told troops gathered at Pennsylvania's Tobyhanna Army Depot that, "It is deeply irresponsible to rewrite the history of how that war [in Iraq] began."

POLITICS-US: More Wheels Spin Off Iraq Policy

In a major new blow to President George W. Bush's determination to "stay the course" in Iraq, an influential Democratic hawk with close ties to the uniformed military has called for Washington to begin withdrawing U.S. troops immediately.

POLITICS-US: Elites Chastened by Iraq War

U.S. opinion leaders who expressed strong confidence in Washington's global leadership in the late 1990s have been chastened by the Iraq war, which has also spurred a sharp rise in isolationist sentiment in the general public, according to the latest in a series of surveys released here Tuesday by the Pew Research Centre for the People and the Press.

POLITICS-US: Republicans Cut and Run from Iraq and Bush

Although he dislikes foreign travel and formal summits, U.S. President George W. Bush must be relieved to be spending this week as an honoured guest in several Asian capitals. According to the stereotype, Asians are unfailingly polite.

MEDIA-US: Controversial WMD Reporter and NY Times Divorce

Was she an innocent dupe who was played mercilessly by exile chieftain Ahmed Chalabi and his neo-conservative and Pentagon backers who led the march to war with Iraq in March 2003?

POLITICS-US: At Sixty, It’s Uneasy Times for the UN

Like other schemes that have languished out of the spotlight in the backrooms of some of the nation's most prominent right-wing think tanks, the "U.S.-out-of-the-U.N." and the "U.N.-out-of-the-U.S." project appears to be reaching critical mass.

POLITICS-US: Cheney Under Siege

Has U.S. Vice President Dick Cheney become so much of an albatross around his boss' neck that he will have to go?

POLITICS-US: Cheney Circles the Wagons

With his closest aide for the past five years facing arraignment in federal court Thursday on five counts of perjury and obstruction of justice, U.S. Vice President Dick Cheney appears to be hunkering down with a familiar cast of faces.

POLITICS-US: A Formidable Hawk Goes Down

Losing I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, perhaps the most influential national security official without a formal cabinet rank, marks a serious blow to the George W. Bush administration and particularly to the hawks who led the drive to war in Iraq.

POLITICS-US: Cheney’s Top Aide Indicted in CIA Leak Case

U.S. Vice President Dick Cheney's chief of staff and top national security aide resigned Friday, hours before a grand jury formally indicted him on charges of perjury and obstruction of justice following a 22-month probe into the public disclosure of the identity of a covert Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) operative.

POLITICS-US: Frustrated Scowcroft Assails Neo-Cons, Cheney

One week after a top aide to former Secretary of State Colin Powell issued a blistering attack on foreign policy-making in the George W. Bush administration, Brent Scowcroft, who served as national security adviser under Bush's father, assailed neo-conservatives who persuaded the president to go to war in Iraq.

IRAQ: Two Years Later, U.S. Still Can’t Keep the Lights On

The reconstruction of Iraq is failing rapidly despite repeated claims of progress by the George W. Bush administration, according to a number of U.S. officials and reports released here this week.

RIGHTS-US: Serious Lapses Taint Probes of Detainee Deaths

Despite repeated vows by the Pentagon to fully investigate the deaths of all detainees in U.S. custody in Iraq and elsewhere in the "war on terror", a major human rights group has found a pattern of "grossly inadequate and flawed investigations" that have made it difficult or impossible to hold perpetrators accountable.

POLITICS-US: Powell Aide Blasts Rice, Cheney- Rumsfeld ‘Cabal’

As top officials in the White House and Vice President Dick Cheney’s office await possible criminal indictments for their efforts to discredit a whistleblower, a top aide to former Secretary of State Colin Powell, Wednesday, accused a ''cabal'' led by Cheney and Pentagon chief Donald Rumsfeld of hijacking U.S. foreign policy by circumventing or ignoring formal decision-making channels.

POLITICS-US: Washington on Tenterhooks Over Leak Case

Wrapping up a two-year investigation that a growing number of legal analysts expect to yield indictments of at least one, and possibly two, of the George W. Bush administration's most powerful men as early as this week, Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald has Washington on pins and needles.

POLITICS-US: Bush Seen Increasingly as a Failed President

Amid growing signs of disarray and malaise in the White House, U.S. President George W. Bush is seen increasingly by the public at large as a failure whose policies, particularly regarding the economy and the budget, have harmed more than helped the country, according to a major new poll released here Thursday.

POLITICS-IRAQ: A Lose-Lose Referendum?

Five days before Saturday's referendum on Iraq's proposed constitution, the U.S. foreign policy elite appears both anxious and gloomy, increasingly worried that win or lose, the process will bring Iraq one step closer to civil war and, with it, the possible destabilisation of the wider region.

POLITICS-US: Condi May Be Bush’s Expediency Council

Just as the theocratic leadership in Iran is trying to rein in the aggressive nationalism of the new president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, so Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice appears to be restraining aggressive nationalists in Washington who want to escalate rising tensions with Iran and Syria.

POLITICS-US: Bush Raises the Stakes in Terror War

Despite fading public - and Republican - confidence in his performance in Iraq and the wider "war on terror", U.S. President George W. Bush Thursday raised the stakes by warning that a U.S. withdrawal from Iraq would lead to a takeover by al Qaeda and the subversion of its pro-western neighbours.

FINANCE: Tax Cuts, Oil Appetite Eroding U.S. Sovereignty

A combination of huge tax cuts, an insatiable appetite for foreign imports, especially oil, and record government spending is steadily eroding U.S. independence and freedom of action, according to a "special report" released Thursday by the influential Council on Foreign Relations (CFR).

POLITICS-IRAQ: Can the US Military Presence Avert Civil War?

The growing spectre of a full-scale civil war in Iraq - and the likelihood that such a conflict will draw in neighbouring states - has intensified a summer-long debate here over whether and how to withdraw U.S. troops.