Comment est née la “nouvelle stratégie” qui doit nous donner la victoire en Irak

Tout le monde connaît le mot “surge”, l’expression “nouvelle stratégie” (en Irak), le discours du 10 janvier, les remous au Congrès et ainsi de suite. On sait moins comment tout cela est né, sinon qu’il s’agit, — certaines sources l’ont indiqué, — d’un plan des néo-conservateurs qui fut présenté à GW le 14 décembre 2006.

Craig Unger publie un excellent article sur la crise courante, dans Vanity Fair, numéro de mars 2007, sous le titre : «From the Wonderful Folks Who Brought You Iraq». Parmi les divers passages nous donnant des détails inédits sur la situation, ses origines et ses perspectives, voici celui qui nous raconte l’aventure de ce plan “neocon” qui aboutit à la “nouvelle stratégie” en cours et scelle la défaite de l’ISG, — ce plan Baker-Hamilton qui devait tout changer et faire rentrer l’insupportable morveux (GW) dans le droit chemin.

«…Just eight days later, on December 14, Bush found a study that was more to his liking. Not surprisingly, it came from the American Enterprise Institute, the intellectual stronghold of neoconservatism. The author, Frederick Kagan, a resident scholar at the A.E.I., is the son of Donald Kagan and the brother of Robert Kagan, who signed PNAC's famous 1998 letter to President Bill Clinton urging him to overthrow Saddam Hussein. According to Kagan, the project began in late September or early October at the instigation of his boss, Danielle Pletka, vice president for foreign and defense policy studies at A.E.I. She decided “it would be helpful to do a realistic evaluation of what would be required to secure Baghdad,” Kagan told Vanity Fair.

»The project culminated in a four-day planning exercise in early December, Kagan said, that just happened to coincide with the release of the Iraq Study Group report. But he rejected the notion that his study had been initiated by the White House as an alternative to the bipartisan assessment. “I'm aware of some of the rumors,” Kagan said. “This was not designed to be an anti-I.S.G. report.… Any conspiracy theories beyond that are nonsense.

» “There was no contact with the Bush administration. We put this together on our own I did not have any contact with the vice president's office prior to … well, I don't want to say that. I have had periodic contact with the vice president's office, but I can't tell you the dates. If you are barking up the story that the V.P. put this together, that is not true.”

»Kagan's report was sharply at odds with the consensus forged by the top brass in Iraq. Iraq commander General George Casey and General John Abizaid, the head of Central Command (CentCom), had argued that sending additional troops to Iraq would be counterproductive. (Later they both reversed course.) Kagan's study, on the contrary, suggested that with a massive surge of new troops America could finally succeed. It cites the military's new counter-insurgency manual, which suggests that a nation can be secured with a force of one soldier for every 40 to 50 inhabitants. That calculus would call for stationing more than 150,000 troops in Baghdad alone (there are currently 17,000 there), far more than is politically feasible today. But Kagan skirts this issue by asserting that “it is neither necessary nor wise to try to clear and hold the entire city all at once.” Focusing instead on certain areas of Baghdad, he concludes that the deployment of 20,000 additional troops would be enough to pacify significant sections of the city. Even the title of Kagan's report must have been more appealing to Bush: ‘Choosing Victory: A Plan for Success in Iraq.’ Soon, it would be announced that Casey and Abizaid were being replaced with more amenable officers: Lieutenant General David Petraeus and Admiral William J. Fallon, respectively. The escalation was on.»

La première chose qui nous frappe dans ces confidences improvisées, c’est le caractère improvisé, hasardeux, complètement amateur (ce terme sans jugement de valeur, — comme un fait) d’une décision qui implique un potentiel de crise formidable (en Irak, avec l’Iran, à Washington entre Congrès et exécutif). Notre avis, à la lecture de ce passage, est que l’un des éléments importants du choix de GW, d’après ce que nous sentons et croyons deviner de la psychologie du personnage, est l’intitulé du rapport de Kagan, d’un optimisme roboratif pour un esprit simple (‘Choosing Victory: A Plan for Success in Iraq.’, dont Unger nous dit : «Even the title of Kagan's report must have been more appealing to Bush…»)

La seconde remarque, c’est de découvrir combien ce plan était en désaccord avec la hiérarchie militaire et combien celle-ci, finalement, s’est alignée sur le choix du président sans broncher, avec de-ci de-là une récompense pour l’un ou l’autre comme reconnaissance pour cette souplesse (Casey nommé chef d’état-major de l’U.S. Army). Bien évidemment, les militaires ont pris une certaine revanche en introduisant une dimension technologique maximale dans le “surge” en Irak.

En résumé, — une incroyable confusion, un mélange des genres et des légitimités presque surréaliste, — ou bien, si l’on veut, une bouillie pour chats.

Mis en ligne le 9 février 2007 à 05H02