US-Iraq /WRD No American Believes Bush Can Win Iraq war: US Journalist

18 September 2007

Berlin-There is not a single American who believes US President George W. Bush can eventually win the Iraq war, said a prominent US journalist in Berlin Monday evening.

"I don't think any of the 300 million (Americans) think we can win this war," said Richard Reeves in his lecture at the Berlin-based American Academy think-tank.

Reeves who is a writer, syndicated columnist and lecturer at the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles added, "It (the Iraq war) was a huge mistake and now it's a disaster."

The expert stressed the US will be forced to withdraw a major portion of its troops from Iraq as a result of American public pressure.

Reeves lambasted also Bush's "insane" military threats against Iran in the wake of the failed Iraq military campaign.

He pointed out that the US has lost its status as "a political, moral and economic super power" during both presidential terms of Bush.

"We lost everything in seven years," added Reeves.

The scholar emphasized also that the next US administration would have to do an "enormous number of fences to mend" on the international scene following Bush's unilateral foreign policies.

He branded Bush one of the two weakest presidents in the history of America.

Speaking about the 2008 presidential elections, Reeves said the country is "in the middle of a political revolution".

He added next year's presidential race will be "great defining elections in America".

"In this election, we do not know how Americans will vote," Reeves said.

The journalist predicted that the US Senator form New York Hillary Clinton will be the Democratic presidential while her counterparty from Arizona, John McCain will win the Republican nomination.

Reeves' column has appeared in more than 100 newspapers since 1979.

He has received dozens of awards for his work in print, television and film.

Educated as a mechanical engineer, Richard Reeves began his career in journalism at the age of 23, founding the Phillipsburg Free Press in Phillipsburg , New Jersey.

He has been a correspondent for the Newark Evening News and the New York Herald Tribune and was the Chief Political Correspondent of The New York Times.

Reeves has also written for numerous other publications, becoming National Editor and Columnist for Esquire and New York Magazine along the way.

Named a "literary lion" by the New York Public Library, Reeves has won a number of print journalism awards and has been a Pulitzer Prize finalist and juror.

In 1975, Reeves published his first book, A Ford, not a Lincoln.

His President Kennedy: Profile of Power is now considered the authoritative work on the 35th president, has won several national awards and was named the Best Non-Fiction Book of 1993 by Time and Book of the Year by Washington Monthly.

Reeves has also worked extensively on television and in film.

The expert has made six television films and won all of television's major documentary awards: the Emmy for "Lights, Camera Politics!" for ABC News; the Columbia-DuPont Award for "Struggle for Birmingham" for PBS; and the George Foster Peabody Award for "Red Star over Khyber" for PBS.

Reeves has also appeared in two feature films, "Dave" and " Seabiscuit".

In 1998, he won the Carey McWilliams Award of the American Political Science Association for distinguished contributions to the understanding of American politics.

He was the Goldman Lecturer on American Civilization and Government at the Library of Congress that year; the lectures were published by Harvard University Press under the title What the People Know: Freedom and the Press.

Reeves is currently working in the United States and Europe on a history of the Berlin Airlift, scheduled for publication in 2008.