Syrie, guerre insaisissable

Syrie, guerre insaisissable

Patrick Cockburn, qui publie dans une vaste palette de journaux, de revues et de sites, de The Independent à CounterPunch, est évidemment connu comme spécialiste des guerres et divers troubles du Moyen-Orient. Un article de lui dans la London Review of Books du 23 mai 2013, sous la forme d’une analyse de réflexion à partir de ses reportages plutôt que d’un simple reportage, présente un intérêt certain... On pourrait le prendre, cet article, comme une tentative d’identification de la “guerre syrienne” (avec les guillemets que nous prenons toujours la précaution de mettre, comme devant une sorte d’“objet guerrier non identifié”).

Certes, l’article de Cockburn redresse nombre d’insanités et de grossièretés des esprits les plus zélés des élites-Système du bloc BAO. Mais cela, c’est l’examen quotidien de l’infamie et du désordre du bloc américaniste-occidentaliste, dont la particularité est une constante accélération de la subversion et de l’inversion des fonctions de perception et de nuanciation des réalités rencontrées. On retrouve le désordre extraordinaire de la perception qui s’accompagne de cette étrange atonie intellectuelle semblant interdire toute évolution du jugement. Cockburn met indirectement cela en évidence, par quelques rappels historiques et par la simple confrontation de son expérience et des réactions que cette expérience suscite. Mais il y a autre chose, de beaucoup plus passionnant, qui se dégage indirectement et plus profondément du texte de Cockburn, sans que lui-même identifie précisément cette question. Il s’agit d’une sorte d’impuissance, d’incapacité intellectuelle objective à saisir l’essence même de cette guerre, sa signification, son identité, – et cette fois, cela même pour ceux qui perçoivent sans entrave et observent lucidement, et surtout sinon exclusivement pour ceux-là puisque les autres en restent docilement à la narrative conformiste qui leur tient lieu de plat du jour.

Nous avons choisi deux extraits de cet article. Le premier, le plus important, est l’entrée de l’article. Il décrit la situation et pourrait être finalement résumé par le constat que “personne ne sait vraiment ce qui se passe”, – pour ajouter tout de même que toutes les prévisions occidentales, particulièrement sur la rapidité du conflit, sur l’issue évidente (la chute d’Assad en quelques semaines) se sont révélées d’une fausseté telle qu’on atteint ici à un phénomène objectif où la propagande, y compris l’auto-persuasion, ne suffisent plus à expliquer l’aveuglement. C’est alors (immédiatement à la suite de l’extrait) que Cockburn poursuit, accentuant cette impression d’insaisissabilité opérationnelle : «The reality is that no one is [winning the war...]» Il enchaîne en repoussant les comparaisons avec les autres interventions, révoltes ou conflits du printemps arabe ayant abouti (Tunisie, Égypte, Libye) pour en revenir à des références plus insaisissables (guerre civile de 15 ans au Liban, guerre civile toujours en cours en Irak), mais qui restèrent à peu près contenues dans leurs cadres respectifs, qui restèrent des guerres “limitées”, des conflits refermés sur leur aire géographique.

... Et puis, les deux paragraphes formant le second extrait (et la conclusion de l’article), exposent au contraire le second thème, complètement contradictoire, de l’extraordinaire “ouverture” de cette guerre, qui semble destinée à s’étendre, à enflammer toute la région (»There is virtually no state in the region that hasn’t got some stake in the conflict»), en une infinité de conflits, jusqu’à la résurrection d’une réminiscence de la guerre froide. On se rappelle brusquement que la guerre “enfermée”, contenue, outrageusement grossie dans la prévision d’événements précipités, où “personne ne sait vraiment ce qui se passe”, est également ce conflit qui est le cadre de grandes manœuvres entre la Russie et Israël à propos d’une simple livraison de missiles (les S-300), que l’Iran et le Hezbollah se battent sur le territoire syrien, qu’Israël s’affirme prêt à lancer une guerre-éclair (éventuellement si Assad est renversé, ce qui en fait un allié “objectif” d’Assad), que les Russes font de la Syrie un enjeu majeur contre les USA, que la Turquie voudrait profiter de cette guerre pour faire un Grand Califat dans lequel viendrait s’insérer une nation kurde, que les pays du Golfe, sauf l’incompréhensible Qatar, sont affolés par la tournure des événements et prévoient une confrontation générale où ils craignent d’être laissés à eux-mêmes, et ainsi de suite... A ce point, on se trouve expédié dans un autre univers de tensions crisiques insupportables, d’enjeux presque planétaires. Là-dessus, s’ajoutent les aspects spécifiques, étonnants et incongrus, de cette guerre, qui font qu’on peut sans aucun doute parler d’un conflit de quatrième génération (G4G) d’une forme particulièrement spécifique (voir le 25 mai 2013).

Cela nous conduits à la conclusion que la “guerre syrienne”, guillemets compris, est quelque chose d’à la fois insaisissable et non-identifiable. Il s’agit certainement, aujourd’hui, d’un événement qui est devenu le plus résilient, le plus durable, à la fois chaotique et apparemment explosif mais dont l'explosion finale est sans cesse repoussée, qui a relégué les autres au second rang, – notamment cette crise iranienne qui dominait la région avant l’affaire syrienne et qui est désormais en train de se modifier rapidement elle-même. La Syrie est l’événement le plus actif de cette fameuse crise haute dont nul ne sait exactement quelles perspectives en attendre, et qui semble se créer et se définir comme quelque chose de différent et d’unique à mesure qu’elle progresse.

• Le début de l’article de Patrick Cockburn... «For the first two years of the Syrian civil war foreign leaders regularly predicted that Bashar al-Assad’s government would fall any day. In November 2011, King Abdullah of Jordan said that the chances of Assad’s surviving were so slim he ought to step down. In December last year, Anders Rasmussen, the Nato secretary general, said: ‘I think the regime in Damascus is approaching collapse.’ Even the Russian Foreign Ministry – which generally defends Assad – has at times made similar claims. Some of these statements were designed to demoralise Assad’s supporters by making his overthrow seem inevitable. But in many cases outsiders genuinely believed that the end was just round the corner. The rebels kept claiming successes, and the claims were undiscriminatingly accepted.

»That Assad’s government is on its last legs has always been something of a myth. YouTube videos of victorious rebel fighters capturing military outposts and seizing government munitions distract attention from the fact that the war is entering its third year and the insurgents have succeeded in capturing just one of the 14 provincial capitals. (In Libya the insurgents held Benghazi and the whole of the east as well as Misrata and smaller towns in the west from the beginning of the revolt.) The Syrian rebels were never as strong militarily as the outside world supposes. But they have always been way ahead of the government in their access to the international media. Whatever the uprising has since become it began in March 2011 as a mass revolt against a cruel and corrupt police state. The regime at first refused to say much in response, then sounded aggrieved and befuddled as it saw the vacuum it had created being filled with information put out by its enemies. Defecting Syrian soldiers were on television denouncing their former masters while government units that had stayed loyal remained unreported and invisible. And so it has largely continued. The ubiquitous YouTube videos of minor, and in some cases illusory, victories by the rebels are put about in large part to persuade the world that, given more money and arms, they can quickly win a decisive victory and end the war.

»There is a striking divergence between the way the Syrian war is seen in Beirut – just a few hours’ drive from Damascus, even now – and what actually appears to be happening on the ground inside Syria. On recent trips I would drive to Damascus, having listened to Syrians and non-Syrians in Beirut who sincerely believed that rebel victory was close, only to find the government still very much in control. Around the capital, the rebels held some suburbs and nearby towns, but in December I was able to travel the ninety miles between Damascus and Homs, Syria’s third largest city, without any guards and with ordinary heavy traffic on the road. Friends back in Beirut would shake their heads in disbelief when I spoke about this and politely suggest that I’d been hoodwinked by the regime.

»Some of the difficulties in reporting the war in Syria aren’t new. Television has a great appetite for the drama of war, for pictures of missiles exploding over Middle Eastern cities amid the sparkle of anti-aircraft fire. Print journalism can’t compete with these images, but they are rarely typical of what is happening. Despite the iconic images Baghdad wasn’t, in fact, heavily bombarded in either 1991 or 2003. The problem is much worse in Syria than it used to be in Iraq or Afghanistan (in 2001) because the most arresting pictures out of Syria appear first on YouTube and are, for the most part, provided by political activists. They are then run on TV news with health warnings to the effect that the station can’t vouch for their veracity, but viewers assume that the station wouldn’t be running the film if it didn’t believe it was real. Actual eyewitnesses are becoming hard to find, since even people living a few streets from the fighting in Damascus now get most of their information from the internet or TV.

»Not all YouTube evidence is suspect. Though easily fabricated, it performs certain tasks well. It can show that atrocities have taken place, and even authenticate them: in the case of a pro-government militia massacring rebel villagers, for instance, or rebel commanders mutilating and executing government soldiers. Without a video of him doing so, who would have believed that a rebel commander had cut open a dead government soldier and eaten his heart? Pictures of physical destruction are less reliable because they focus on the worst damage, giving the impression – which may or may not be true – that a whole district is in ruins. What YouTube can’t tell you is who is winning the war...»

• Les deux paragraphes qui concluent l’article... « There is virtually no state in the region that hasn’t got some stake in the conflict. Jordan, though nervous of a jihadi victory in Syria, is allowing arms shipments from Saudi Arabia to reach rebels in southern Syria by road. Qatar has reportedly spent $3 billion on supporting the rebels over the last two years and has offered $50,000 to every Syrian army defector and his family. In c0-ordination with the CIA it has sent seventy military flights to Turkey with arms and equipment for the insurgents. The Tunisian government says that eight hundred Tunisians are fighting on the rebel side but security sources are quoted as saying the real figure is closer to two thousand. Moaz al-Khatib, the outgoing president of the Syrian National Coalition, which supposedly represents the opposition, recently resigned, declaring as he did so that the group was controlled by outside powers – i.e. Saudi Arabia and Qatar. ‘The people inside Syria,’ he said, ‘have lost the ability to decide their own fate. I have become only a means to sign some papers while hands from different parties want to decide on behalf of the Syrians.’ He claimed that on one occasion a rebel unit failed to go to the rescue of villagers being massacred by government forces because they hadn’t received instructions from their paymasters.

»Fear of widespread disorder and instability is pushing the US, Russia, Iran and others to talk of a diplomatic solution to the conflict. Some sort of peace conference may take place in Geneva over the next month, with the aim at least of stopping things getting worse. But while there is an appetite for diplomacy, nobody knows what a solution would look like. It’s hard to imagine a real agreement being reached when there are so many players with conflicting interests. Five distinct conflicts have become tangled together in Syria: a popular uprising against a dictatorship which is also a sectarian battle between Sunnis and the Alawite sect; a regional struggle between Shia and Sunni which is also a decades-old conflict between an Iranian-led grouping and Iran’s traditional enemies, notably the US and Saudi Arabia. Finally, at another level, there is a reborn Cold War confrontation: Russia and China v. the West. The conflict is full of unexpected and absurd contradictions, such as a purportedly democratic and secular Syrian opposition being funded by the absolute monarchies of the Gulf who are also fundamentalist Sunnis...»

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