The annual address on the state of the Union, given by American President Bush to the two Chambers gathered in Congress in recent days, was the occasion for the main European dailies to review the state of American foreign policy four months after the tragic attacks of 11 September. “George W. Bush on the front of the recession”, is the headline carried for instance in Le Monde of 30/1. “Recession, rising unemployment and the end of the ‘irrational exuberance’ that had characterized the years of the ‘new economy'”: these, says the French daily, are the main phenomena that Bush finds himself having to tackle to appease public opinion. The economic question is especially decisive: “For the first time in four years emphasizes Le Monde the budget is likely to be in deficit for 2002. Inhibited by the wave of patriotism, but forced to prepare for the mid-term elections in November, the opposition is in the search for a leader”. “The government and the opposition comments, in this regard, Patrick Jarreau in the article find themselves where they were before 11 September, when the question was that of the deductions made from pension contributions, especially to finance military expenditure”. The fight against terrorism and the economy: these, points out La Croix (29/1), were the main fronts of Bush’s speech to Congress. Bush is facing “an important year” in his presidency. In the autumn, as Gilles Biassette and Guillemet Faure point out in the French Catholic daily, “the Americans will vote to renew the Chamber of Representatives and a third of the Senate. Bearing in mind the current balance of forces, already extremely fragile in the present Congress, the ballot promises to be delicate”. While the American President was giving his state of the Union address, “Bush and the Republicans are enjoying an historic wave of popularity”, note Richard Morin and Dana Milbank in the Herald Tribune (30/1): “The extraordinary level of popularity of Bush – higher and more enduring that any other President in modern times is even more remarkable since it comes at a time when American public opinion is having serious doubts about the economy and domestic affairs”. “ The cages of Guantanamo” is the title of the article that the German magazine Spiegel of 28/1 devotes to the Taliban prisoners being detained in the American base in Cuba; the two authors of the article, Fritjof Mayer and Gerhard Spörl, declare that the superpower has been caught “ utterly unprepared, and finds itself exposed to a wave of indignation at the world level on the treatment being meted out to its Afghan prisoners. But Washington prefers to risk a violation of international law rather than renounce its intention to bring the detainees before a military court“. To the protests already made by their allies, the Americans respond that the prisoners are “ illegal combatants, a concept unknown to international law“. Also devoted to the same question is the article of Katja Gelinsky in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung of 28/1, “ Long-standing differences“. Gelinsky writes that “ the Americans are not always interested in what people think and write about them in Europe“, but “the hostile reactions to the treatment of its Taliban prisoners is arousing attention even in Washington“; “the current debate reflects long-standing differences between the Europeans and the Americans, that for some time had been pushed into the background, due to the terrorist attacks “. But criticism on the matter has also been expressed in the USA: the American writer Barbara Probst Solomon judges the conditions of the Taliban prisoners at Guantanamo “ unacceptable” and “inhumane“ in an article written for the Spanish daily El Pais of 22/1. Another Spanish daily La Razón of 27/1 denounces the “ shameful silence of governments…we cannot remain silent, as passive accomplices of the degradation of democracy, by pleading the excuse of the anti-terrorist campaign“. La Vanguardia of 27/1 waxes ironical in its assessment of the situation: it judges “ ingenuous the praiseworthy intention to regulate with a few reliable ethical criteria the inhumanity of the battlefield and the treatment meted out to the vanquished. But in recent days there have no lack of those who applauded the resolution and power displayed by the Americans on the battle front but who now claim magnanimity for the survivors“. In the same paper (25/1) the Spanish theologian J.I.Gozález Faus in an open letter to Bush writes: “ I’m a citizen of a country that was an empire for a period in its history. And this obliges me to remind you of what all empires forget: the end does not justify the means“.¤
