POLITICS: U.S. Has Zero Credibility Among Muslims – Pentagon Panel

Al-Qaeda and radical Islamists are winning the propaganda war against the United States, says a high-level Pentagon panel, which concluded that Bush administration policies in the Middle East, its fundamental failure to understand the Muslim world and a lack of imagination in using new communications technologies are responsible.

POLITICS-U.S.: Hawks Push Regime Change in North Korea

The coalition of foreign-policy hawks that promoted the 2003 invasion of Iraq is pressing President George W Bush to adopt a more coercive policy toward North Korea, despite strong opposition from China and South Korea.

POLITICS-U.S.: Hawks Flying High With Rice Posting

U.S. President George W Bush's nomination of National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice to replace Secretary of State Colin Powell consolidates the control over U.S. foreign policy of the coalition of hawks that promoted the war in Iraq, led by Vice President Dick Cheney.

POLITICS-U.S.: The Good Soldier Abandons the Field

Monday's announcement that Secretary of State Colin Powell, by far the most popular of U.S. President George W Bush's war cabinet, has submitted his resignation marks the formal launch of a new scramble for top national-security posts that could bring an even more hard-line configuration to power.

POLITICS-U.S.: Neo-Con Agenda: Iran, China, Russia, Latin America …

An influential foreign-policy neo-conservative with longstanding ties to top hawks in the administration of President George W Bush has laid out what he calls ''a checklist of the work the world will demand of this president and his subordinates in a second term.''

U.S. ELECTION: New Bush Foreign Policy Posture Unlikely

Earnest hopes that U.S. President George W Bush will be prepared to seriously ''reach out'' to U.S. friends and allies overseas to make his foreign policy less aggressive and unilateral in his second term are likely to be earnestly disappointed.

U.S. ELECTION: The Test for the West

It is the future unity of the ''West'' that, more than any other basic factor in contemporary global affairs, is most at stake in Tuesday's presidential elections.

U.S. ELECTION: Republican Desertions Could Cost Bush

While the vast majority of Democrats who voted for Green Party candidate Ralph Nader in 2000 are now lining up behind Senator John Kerry, Republicans unhappy with President George W Bush are having a much harder time deciding what to do next Tuesday.

POLITICS-U.S.: Sidelined Neo-Cons Stoke Future Fires

Sidelined by their failed predictions for Iraq and U.S. President George W Bush's efforts to reassure voters he is not a warmonger, prominent neo-conservatives and their Christian Right allies are nonetheless trying hard to prepare the ground for future U.S. adventures in the Middle East.

POLITICS-US: Three Years On, War on Terrorism Looks Like a Loser

Three years after al Qaeda-commandeered planes crashed into the World Trade Center towers in New York and the Pentagon, the leaked ruminations of Pentagon chief Donald Rumsfeld seem more pertinent than ever.

POLITICS: Seeking Method in the Madness of Abu Ghraib

âÇ "The American political system has never been as sick as it is today," says Belgian philosopher Lieven De Cauter, in a wide-ranging interview where he discusses his theories about the "state of exception" in the context of the Bush administration's "war on terror".

POLITICS-U.S.: Spy Probe Scans Neo Con-Israel Ties

The burgeoning scandal over claims that a Pentagon official passed highly classified secrets to a Zionist lobby group appears to be part of a much broader set of FBI and Pentagon investigations of close collaboration between prominent U.S. neo-conservatives and Israel dating back some 30 years.

POLITICS-U.S.: Attacking Neo-Cons From the Right

Why did the Bush administration invade Iraq?

POLITICS-U.S.: Neo-Cons Target Terrorism By Reviving Communism Foe

A bipartisan group of 41 mainly neo-conservative foreign-policy hawks has launched the third Committee on the Present Danger (CPD) whose previous two incarnations mobilised public support for rolling back Soviet-led communism but whose new enemy will be ''global terrorism''.

POLITICS-U.S.: Realists and Neo-Cons Renew Battle on Iran

A new round in the ongoing battle between realists and neo-conservative and other hawks over Iran policy got underway here Monday as a task force of the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) published a new report urging Washington to engage Tehran on a selected range of issues of mutual concern.

POLITICS-U.S.: Cheney In the Balance?

Now that Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry has chosen Senator John Edwards as his vice-presidential running-mate, the capital's attention has shifted to the fate of Vice President Dick Cheney.

POLITICS-U.S.: Realism Sprouts More Buds

Two weeks after compromising with its traditional allies on the wording of a key U.N. Security Council resolution on Iraq, U.S. foreign policy under George W. Bush appears to be moving further toward the more-realist policies of his father in other areas as well.

POLITICS-U.S.: 9/11 Panel Challenges Bush on Al-Qaeda-Iraq Links

In a direct challenge to recent assertions by both President George W Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney, the special bipartisan commission investigating the Sep. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks against New York and the Pentagon has found ''no credible evidence'' of any operational link between Iraq and al-Qaeda.

POLITICS-U.S.: Neo-Con Collapse in Washington and Baghdad

Fourteen months after reaching the zenith of their influence on U.S. foreign policy with the invasion of Iraq, neo-conservatives appear to have fallen entirely out of favour, both within the administration of President George W Bush and in Baghdad itself.

IRAQ-U.S.: Neo-Cons Call For Military Solution

Despite a tidal wave of bad news from the Iraq occupation they did so much to promote, neo-conservatives are calling for U.S. President George W Bush to pursue a military solution against resistance fighters there.

POLITICS-U.S.: Pentagon’s Feith Again at Centre of Disaster

Although it will take weeks, if not months, to sort out precisely who was responsible for what increasingly appears to have been the systemic abuse by U.S. soldiers of Iraqi detainees, it should be no surprise if Undersecretary of Defence for Policy Douglas Feith is found to have played an important role.