Fiasco : tout le monde y a droit

Dans la d’ores et déjà considérable bibliographie consacrée à la folle aventure irakienne, une très grande place a été faite aux erreurs sans nombre du pouvoir civil. Un peu par défaut, et parce que certaines prises de position restent en mémoire (notamment celle du général Shinseki, chef d’état-major très mal-aimé de l’U.S. Army jusqu’en 2003), on considère souvent que les forces armées ont plutôt bien figuré dans l’aventure : la désapprouvant au départ, freinant son organisation, tentant de limiter les dégâts, etc.

Le livre récemment publié Fiasco — The American Military Adventure in Iraq, de Thomas E. Ricks, journaliste du Washington Post, remet les choses un peu mieux en place. Il ajoute à la dimension des responsabilités politiques celle des responsabilités militaires. La description faite par Ricks de l’attaque contre l’Irak, que ce soit sa préparation comme sa réalisation, approfondit encore la question du mystère de l’extraordinaire catastrophe qu’a constitué cet événement du point de vue américain.

Dans le Washington Post du 30 juillet, Daniel Byman fait les observations suivantes sur le livre de Ricks :

« Troubling as these failures are, they are by now reasonably familiar; what's far less well-known is the bungling of the senior military leadership. With devastating detail, Ricks documents how U.S. generals misunderstood the problems they faced in Iraq and shows how poorly prepared the Army was for the unanticipated danger of a postwar Sunni rebellion. For ignoring the risks of an insurgency after Saddam Hussein's fall, Gen. Tommy Franks, the head of U.S. Central Command, “flunks strategy,” Ricks writes; the war's commanding general designed “perhaps the worst war plan in American history.” Gen. Richard Myers, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff during the invasion, and his deputy, Gen. Peter Pace (who's since been promoted to take Myers's old job), come off as smiling yes-men who went along with amateurish impulses from the Bush administration's political leadership and who forsook their duty to offer detached, professional judgments, acting instead as administration flacks in both private and public.

» As a result of the lapses of the top brass and the haughtiness of Rumsfeld's men, the U.S. military came into Iraq inadequately prepared — and hard-pressed to adapt. From the start, it failed to recognize that ensuring public order was the key to postwar success. As one general puts it, “I was on a street corner in Baghdad, smoking a cigar, watching some guys carry a sofa by — and it never occurred to me that I was going to be the guy to go get that sofa back.”

» As the insurgency deepened, the Pentagon's military and civilian leaders first ignored it, then worsened it by using wrongheaded tactics. By emphasizing killing the enemy rather than winning over the people, the U.S. military made new enemies more quickly than it eliminated existing foes. Mass arrests and other attempts to intimidate Iraqis backfired, swelling the insurgents' ranks. U.S. units and troops deployed to Iraq turned over quickly, shuttling in and out of the country with little attempt to build a coherent intelligence picture of the situation on the ground or to sustain hard-won relationships with the local Iraqi officials trying to make their country work. Cities such as Mosul and Fallujah were liberated from insurgents and then abandoned; inevitably, the insurgents took over again. Such mistakes are depressing but not entirely surprising: The U.S. military has forgotten many of the lessons of counterinsurgency warfare that it learned bitterly in Vietnam and elsewhere. Having neglected counterinsurgency in the military's training and education programs, we should not be shocked that we are ill-equipped to wage it.

» Indeed, the picture Ricks paints is so damning that it is, at times, too charitable to say that the military and civilian leadership failed. Fiasco portrays several commanders as misguided but trying their best, but others — particularly the hapless Franks — appear not to have tried at all. Worse, the overall war and occupation effort lacked the high-level White House coordination essential to victory, allowing Bremer to operate on his own, making major decisions without consulting the Pentagon or the National Security Council, let alone his counterparts on the military side of the occupation. »

Il paraît que Ricks termine sur une certaine note d’optimisme. Les militaires US seraient en train de décompter leurs erreurs, de les analyser et de tenter d’y porter remède. Cet optimisme nous semble relever d’une rêverie type-Disneyland ou d’une obligation contractuelle de l’auteur (“be positive”, quelque chose comme ça). Byman a le bon sens et le bon goût d’émettre quelques doutes : « Ricks is right to note positive U.S. moves such as revamping training programs and changing leadership, but the Army is still too focused on winning battles against individual insurgents and not focused enough on providing security for the Iraqi people as a whole, which is the key to undermining the insurgents. […] Ricks begins Fiasco with the ancient strategist Sun Tzu's admonition about how to achieve victory: “Know your enemies, know yourself.” Clearly, those who took us to war in 2003 knew neither. The question today is whether they can learn. » Bonne question.

Mis en ligne le 6 août 2006 à 15H04