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5326Trump est-il l’Antéchrist avec lequel nous avons rendez-vous ? C’est une hypothèse intéressante, écrite avec une ironie fatiguée et un brin de “après tout pourquoi pas ?”, qui couronne le texte de Danny Sjursen sur le site TomDispatch.com de Tom Engelhardt. Dans tous les cas, Trump possède l’instrument pour hâter la Fin des Temps, c’est-à-dire “The American Chaos Machine” que représente l’appareil militaire des USA tel qu’il est employé depuis 2001 et 9/11. C’en est au point où Sjursen choisit comme sous-titre de sa conclusion, selon notre traduction, « La Fin des Temps comme politique étrangère ». Cette conclusion, selon nous, vaut citation après un effort de traduction et d’adaptation facilité par DeepL.com.
« Tout cela soulève une autre question troublante : et si le chaos semé par cette administration s'avérait être une fin en soi, une fin qui s'accorde avec les fantasmes millénaristes de certaines factions de la droite chrétienne républicaine ? Après tout, plusieurs personnalités de l'équipe Trump, – notamment le secrétaire d'État Mike Pompeo et le vice-président Mike Pence, – considèrent explicitement le Moyen-Orient selon la vision chrétienne-évangéliste. Comme un pourcentage inquiétant de 73 % des évangélistes (soit 20 % de la population américaine), Pompeo et Pence pensent que le Rapture(c'est-à-dire la fin du monde prophétisé par ce christianisme-évangéliste) va probablement se dérouler dans cette génération et qu’un conflit contemporain en Israël et une guerre imminente avec l’Iran pourraient en fait déclencher des événements annonçant précisément une telle apocalypse.
» Donald Trump est, selon toute vraisemblance, bien trop intéressé, égocentrique et cynique pour adhérer à la foi aveugle et eschatologique des deux Mike. Il est clair qu’il ne croit qu’en Donald Trump. Et pourtant, quelle terrible ironie si, en raison de sa parfaite disposition à déchaîner les tempêtes où il aurait le rôle avantageux, il finissait involontairement par jouer le rôle de cet Antéchrist lui-même dont les évangélistes croient la venue et l’action nécessaires pour provoquer la Fin des Temps.
» Étant donné les fondations de l’Armée du Chaos mise en place pour Trump par George W. Bush et Barack Obama, et la capacité de Trump à ignorer toute prudence, il est difficile d'imaginer un meilleur candidat pour jouer ce rôle. »
Certes, l’hypothèse de la venue de l’Antéchrist n’est pas nouvelle, et elle a déjà été évoquée largement pour notre période, dans le cadre d’un “complotisme métaphysique” qui a sa logique propre et ses zélotes. Comme l’indique Sjursen, il y en a une flopée dans l’administration Trump, et jusqu’à un Vice-Président qui poursuivrait bien à contre-emploi ce rôle d’“Antéchrist” pour accélérer la venue de la Fin des Temps. (Belle perspective pour le cas d’une destitution réussie.)
Sjursen a été officier dans l’U.S. Army et il a servi dans les diverses campagnes en cours, notamment en Irak et en Afghanistan, alternant avec des postes bureaucratiques et également une période d’enseignement de l’histoire à West Point. Il a pu voir lors de ses déploiements en zone de combat les incroyables destructions, massacres, tueries qui ont marqué ces conflits. Il y a cinq ans, selon ses propres mots, Sjursen est devenu “un dissident” alors qu’il était encore major dans l’U.S. Army, avant de quitter l’armée pour devenir auteur et complètement dissident.
Son article est à la fois un rappel de l’activité militariste des USA depuis 9/11, et une réflexion sur le fonctionnement de cette activité, sur ses aspects de plus en plus totalement incontrôlables et de plus en plus privés de sens (indifférents à quelque sens que ce soit), sur sa propension extraordinaire à semer le chaos et la destruction sans jamais remporter une victoire ou terminer une guerre, sans aucune stratégie ni but identifiable sinon cette volonté aveugle de détruire et encore de détruire.
Sjursen précise les conditions dans lesquelles se font les opérations, la façon dont les opérations se décident, la façon dont les officiers d’état-major peuvent orienter les décisions des chefs, et il constate que cette machinerie en apparence équilibrée finit par produire de plus en plus de situations monstrueuses. La “Machine de Guerre” se transforme ainsi en “Machine du Chaos”, sans le moindre sens, sans autre objectif que “le chaos pour le chaos”. Nous sommes désormais bien loin des conceptions en vogue dans les années 2000 du “chaos créateur” adapté pour la machinerie militaire à partir des conceptions capitalistes, et théorisées par les même robots-neocons déjà en service sous G.W. Bush et qu’on retrouve aujourd’hui avec Donald Trump.
A lire le rappel de ces développements où le rôle d’Obama n’a rien à envier à celui de GW dans la transformation radicale de la “Machine de Guerre” en “Machine du Chaos”, on comprend la vanité de ces diverses théories soi-disant sophistiquées, plus ou moins “complotistes”, etc. Le développement de ce phénomène unique relève d’une tendance à la destruction qui n’a plus rien de conceptuel ni de rationnel, – même de conceptuel et de rationnel dans les orientations les plus critiquables, comme l’impérialisme, les plans de conquête, etc. On a vraiment la sensation d’une machinerie de destruction qui a échappé à tout contrôle et qui évolue selon sa propre logique folle de destruction.
Ainsi, estime Sjursen à propos de cette machine de destruction magnifiquement mise en place et équipée par Bush et Obama, tout se passe comme si elle semblait avoir trouvé son “fou” pour la conduire dans ses options les plus extrêmes, – comme avec l’assassinat de Soleimani. A propos de Trump, Sjursen rappelle la “Théorie du Fou” de Nixon :
« J’appelle cela la théorie du fou, Bob[Nixon parlant à son chef de cabinet Haldeman]. Je veux que les Nord-Vietnamiens croient que j'ai atteint le point où je pourrais faire n’importe quoi pour mettre fin à la guerre. Nous leur ferons passer le mot : “Pour l'amour de Dieu, vous savez que Nixon est obsédé par le communisme. Nous ne pouvons pas le contrôler lorsqu'il est en colère, et cet homme a la main sur le détonateur.” Et Hô Chi Minh en personne sera à Paris dans les deux jours, implorant la paix. »
La théorie de Nixon ne fonctionna pas, et il n’est même pas assuré que Kissinger (qui était chargée d’en faire bon usage) l’utilisa jamais auprès des négociateurs nord-vietnamiens. Mais cette théorie n’était bien entendu qu’un bluff, Nixon n’ayant jamais eu vraiment l’intention d’utiliser du nucléaire. La situation est différente avec Trump, on veut dire plus incertaine, à cause du caractère incontrôlable de Trump, et l’impression qu’il donne de ne pas évaluer précisément les dangers de l’usage des moyens militaires.
C’est selon ces constats que Sjursen nous conduit à nous demander si la “Machine du Chaos” n’a pas trouvé son homme, – son “fou” si l’on veut, ou celui qui est capable de jouer jusqu’au bout le rôle du “fou”, – dans la personne de Donald Trump. D’où la conclusion qu’on a vue plus haut, avec l’hypothèse que les chrétiens-évangélistes placés aux postes de direction pourraient juger que le président de la télé-réalité ferait un excellent Antéchrist, – même s’il s’agit d’un Antéchrist-bouffe, l’essentiel est qu’il accomplisse sa mission et nous fasse déboucher sur la Fin des Temps.
Au début des années 2000, ce genre de supputations s’apparentait au grotesque ou au lunatisme cauchemardesque. Aujourd’hui, où nous nous trouvons devant la cavalcade folle et béante de la “Machine du Chaos” sans explication, sans but, sans raison sinon de détruire pour détruire, après presque vingt années du même exercice, tout se passe comme si, – toujours cette formule maudite et passe-partout de la démonstration, scientifique ! – ceux qui croient à de telles perspectives eschatologiques finissaient par laisser à croire que des explications de cette sorte ne sont pas nécessairement sans le moindre sens, sans le moindre crédit.
Sjursen met bien en évidence pour nous combien nous sommes à bout de souffle sur le territoire de la raison pour donner une appréciation valable, même horriblement pessimiste et destructrice, à cet enchaînement d’événements qui semblent sortir d’une sorte de Mordornécessairement diabolique. Nous sommes au-delà de la critique politique extrémiste, au-delà du complotisme, au-delà de l’activisme secret, du coup d’État dissimulé... La lecture de l’article de Sjursen nous renforce dans l’idée que nous vivons des temps qui sortent complètement des séries historiques, même les plus héroïques et les plus terribles, qu’il s’agit d’interroger la métahistoire directement à partir des événements que nous vivons jour après jour, pour parvenir à leur donner leurs vraies dimensions, que ces vraies dimensions sont effrayantes.
Si nous-mêmes sommes conduits à mentionner cette sorte d’arguments, on imagine ce que peuvent croire, espérer et entreprendre des personnages comme Pompeo et Pence, en position d’influencer un Trump qui est complètement prisonnier des vanités diverses de son narcissisme, qui pour cela ne calcule pas les conséquences de ses actes sinon pour ce qu’elles lui apportent de confirmation de tout le bien qu’il pense de lui-même. L’aveu de Pompeo (son « We Lie, We Cheat, We Steal » [« Nous mentons, nous trichons, nous volons »]) n’est finalement pas la confession un peu cynique et impudente d’un bandit, d’un gangster dans sa fonction de tueur, enfin d’un homme sans foi ni loi ; justement le contraire, c’est la déclaration pleine de vérité selon ce qu’il croit, d’un homme de foi qui est prêt à toutes les vilenies pour faire se réaliser la prophétie à laquelle il croit et la loi de laquelle il se soumet. On se doute que, dans ces conditions, la fréquentation d’Israël comme l’a instituée l’administration Trump couronne le tout.
L’article de Danny Sjursen sur le site TomDispatch.com de Tom Engelhardt est édité le 23 janvier 2020sur ce site.
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In March 1906, on the heels of the U.S. Army’s massacre of some 1,000 men, women, and children in the crater of a volcano in the American-occupied Philippines, humorist Mark Twain took his criticism public. A long-time anti-imperialist, he flippantly suggested that Old Glory should be redesigned “with the white stripes painted black and the stars replaced by the skull and cross-bones.”
I got to thinking about that recently, five years after I became an antiwar dissenter (while still a major in the U.S. Army), and in the wake of another near-war, this time with Iran. I was struck yet again by the way every single U.S. military intervention in the Greater Middle East since 9/11 has backfired in wildly counterproductive ays, destabilizing a vast expanse of the planet stretching from West Africa to South Asia.
Chaos, it seems, is now Washington’s stock-in-trade. Perhaps, then, it’s time to resurrect Twain’s comment -- only today maybe those stars on our flag should be replaced with the universal symbol for chaos.
After all, our present administration, however unhinged, hardly launched this madness. President Trump’s rash, risky, and repugnant decision to assassinate Iranian Major General Qassem Suleimani on the sovereign soil of Iraq was only the latest version of what has proven to be a pervasive state of affairs. Still, that and Trump’s other recent escalations in the region do illustrate an American chaos machine that’s gone off the rails. And the very manner, – I’m loathe to call it a “process”, – by which it’s happened just demonstrates the way this president has taken American chaos to its dark but logical conclusion.
Any military officer worth his salt knows full well the importance of understanding the basic psychology of your commander. President George W. Bush liked to call himself “the decider,” an apt term for any commander. Senior leaders don’t, as a rule, actually do that much work in the traditional sense. Rather, they hobnob with superiors, buck up unit morale, evaluate and mentor subordinates, and above all make key decisions. It’s the operations staff officers who analyze problems, present options, and do the detailed planning once the boss blesses or signs off on a particular course of action.
Though they may toil thanklessly in the shadows, however, those staffers possess immense power to potentially circumscribe the range of available options and so influence the future mission. In other words, to be a deft operations officer, you need to know your commander’s mind, be able translate his sparse guidance, and frame his eventual choice in such a manner that the boss leaves a “decision briefing” convinced the plan was his own. Believe me, this is the actual language military lifers use to describe the tortured process of decision-making.
In 2009, as a young captain, fresh out of Baghdad, Iraq, I spent two unfulfilling, if instructive, years enmeshed in exactly this sort of planning system. As a battalion-level planner, then assistant, and finally a primary operations officer, I observed this cycle countless times. So allow me to take you “under the hood” for some inside baseball. I, – and just about every new staff officer, – was taught to always provide the boss with three plans, but to suss out ahead of time which one he’d choose (and, above all, which one you wanted him to choose).
Confident in your ability to frame his choices persuasively, you’d often even direct your staffers to begin writing up the full operations order before the boss’s briefing took place. The key to success was what some labeled the Goldilocks method. You’d always present your commander with a too-cautious option, a too-risky option, and a “just-right” course of action. It nearly always worked.
I did this under the command of two very different lieutenant colonels. The first was rational, ethical, empathetic, and tactically competent. He made mission planning easy on his staff. He knew the game as well as we did and only pretended to be fooled. He built relationships with his senior operations officers over the course of months, thereby revealing his preferred methods, tactical predilections, and even personal learning style. Then he’d give just enough initial guidance, – far more than most commanders, – to set his staff going in a reasonably focused fashion.
Unfortunately, that consummate professional moved on to bigger things and his replacement was a sociopath who gave vague, often conflicting guidance, oozed insecurity in briefings, and had a disturbing penchant for choosing the most radical (read: foolhardy) option around. Sound familiar? It should!
Still, military professionals are coached to adapt and improvise and so we did. As a staff we worked to limit his range of options by reverse-ordering the choices we presented him or even lying about nonexistent logistical limitations to stop him from doing the truly horrific.
And as recent events remind us, such exercises play out remarkably similarly, no matter whether you’re dealing at a battalion level (perhaps 400 to 700 troops) or that of this country’s commander-in-chief (more than two million uniformed service personnel). The behind-the-scenes war-gaming of the boss, the entire calculus, remains the same, whether the options are ultimately presented by a captain (me, then) or, – as in the recent decision to assassinate Iranian Major General Suleimani, – Mark Milley, the four-star general at the helm of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
Soon after President Trump’s egregious, a-strategic, dubiously legal, unilateral execution of a uniformed leader of a sovereign country, reports surfaced describing his convoluted decision-making process. Perhaps predictably, it appears that The Donald took his military staff by surprise and chose the most extreme measure they presented him with, – assassinating a foreign military figure. Honestly, that this president did so should have surprised no one. That, according to a report in the New York Times, his generals were indeed surprised strikes me as basic dereliction of duty (especially given that, seven months earlier, Trump had essentially given the green light to such a future assassination, – the deepest desire, by the way, of both his secretary of state and his then-national security advisor, John Bolton).
At this point in their careers, having played out such processes at every possible level for at least 30 years, his generals ought to have known their boss better, toiled valiantly to temper his worst instincts, assumed he might choose the most extreme measure offered and, when he did so, publicly resigned before potentially relegating their soldiers to a hopeless new conflict. That they didn’t, particularly that the lead briefer Milley didn’t, is just further proof that, 18-plus years after our latest round of wars began, such senior leaders lack both competence and integrity.
The current commander-in-chief could never have expanded America’s wars in the Greater Middle East (contra his campaign promises) or unilaterally drone-assassinated a foreign leader, without the militaristic foundations laid down for him by George W. Bush and Barack Obama. So it’s vital to review, however briefly, the chaotic precedents to the rule of Donald Trump.
Guided by a coterie of neoconservative zealots, Bush the Younger committed the nation to the “original sin” of expansive, largely unsanctioned wars as his chosen response to the 9/11 attacks. It was his team that would write the playbook on selling an ill-advised, illegal invasion of Iraq based on bad intelligence and false pretenses. He also escalated tensions with Iran to the brink of war by including the Islamic Republic in an imaginary “axis of evil” (with Iraq and North Korea) after invading first one of its neighbors, Afghanistan, and then the other, Iraq, while imposing sanctions, which froze the assets of Iranians allegedly connected to that country’s nuclear program. He ushered in the use of torture, indefinite detention, extraordinar rendition, illegal domestic mass surveillance, and drone attacks over the sovereign airspace of other countries -- then lied about it all. That neither Congress, nor the courts, nor his successor held him (or anyone else) accountable for such decisions set a dangerous new standard for foreign policy.
Barack Obama promised “hope and change,” a refreshing (if vague) alternative to the sins of the Bush years. The very abstraction of that slogan, however, allowed his supporters to project their own wants, needs, and preferred policies onto the future Obama experiment. So perhaps none of us ought to have been as surprised as many of us were when, despite slowly pulling troops out of Iraq, he only escalated the Afghan War, continued the forever wars in general (even returning to Iraq in 2014), and set his own perilous precedents along the way.
It was, after all, Obama who, as an alternative to large-scale military occupations, took Bush’s drone program and ran with it. He would be the first president to truly earn the sobriquet “assassin-in-chief." He made selecting individuals for assassination in “Terror Tuesday" meetings at the White House banal and put his stamp of approval on the drone campaigns across significant parts of the planet that followed, – even killing American citizens without due process. Encouraged by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, he also launched a new regime-change war in Libya, turning that land into a failed state filled with terror groups, a decision which, he later admitted, added up to a “shit show." After vacillating for a couple years, he also mired the U.S., however indirectly, in the Syrian civil war, empowering Islamist factions there and worsening that already staggering humanitarian catastrophe.
In response to the sudden explosion of the Islamic State, – an al-Qaeda offshoot first catalyzed by the Bush invasion of Iraq and actually formedin an American prison in that country, – its taking of key Iraqi cities and smashing of the American-trained Iraqi army, Obama loosed U.S. air power on them and sent American troops back into that country. He also greatly expanded his predecessor’s nascent military interventions across the African continent. There, too, the results were largely tragic and counterproductive as ethnic militias and Islamic terror groups have spread widely and civil warfare has exploded.
Finally, it was Obama who first sanctioned, supported, and enabled the Saudi terror bombing of Yemen, which, even now, remains perhaps the world’s worst humanitarian disaster. So it is that, from Mali to Libya, Syria to Afghanistan, every one of Bush’s and Obama’s military forays has sowed further chaos, startling body counts, and increased rates of terrorism. It’s those policies, those results, and the military toolbox that went with them that Donald J. Trump inherited in January 2017.
During the climax to the American phase of a 30-year war in Vietnam, newly elected President Richard Nixon, a well-established Republican cold warrior, developed what he dubbed the “madman theory" for bringing the intractable U.S. intervention there to a face-saving conclusion. The president’s chief of staff, H.R. Haldeman, recalled Nixon telling him:
“I call it the Madman Theory, Bob. I want the North Vietnamese to believe I've reached the point where I might do anything to stop the war. We'll just slip the word to them that, ‘for God's sake, you know Nixon is obsessed about communism. We can't restrain him when he's angry—and he has his hand on the nuclear button’ and [North Vietnamese leader] Ho Chi Minh himself will be in Paris in two days begging for peace.”
It didn't work, of course. Nixon escalated and expanded the war. He briefly invaded neighboring Cambodia and Laos, secretly (and illegally) bombed both countries, and ramped up air strikes on North Vietnam. Apart from slaughtering hundreds of thousands of innocents, however, none of this had a notable effect on the ultimate outcome. The North Vietnamese called his bluff, extending the war long enough to force an outright American withdrawal less than four years later. Washington lost in Southeast Asia, just as today it’s losing in the Greater Middle East.
So it was, with the necessary foundations of militarism and hyper-interventionism in place, that Donald Trump entered the White House, at times seemingly intent on testing out his own personal “fire and fury” version of the madman theory. Indeed, his more irrational and provocative foreign policy incitements, including pulling out of the Paris climate accords, spiking a working nuclear deal with Iran, existentially threatening North Korea, seizing Syrian oil fields, sending yet more military personnel into the Persian Gulf region, and most recently assassinating a foreign leader seem right out of some madman instruction manual. And just like Nixon’s stillborn escalations, Trump’s most absurd moves also seem bound to fail.
Take the Suleimani execution as a case in point. An outright regional war has (so far) been avoided, thanks not to the “deal-making” skills of that self-styled “stable genius" in the White House but to Iran’s long history of restraint. As retired Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson, a former top aide to Secretary of State Colin Powell, recently put it: “The leadership in Tehran is far more rational than the leadership in Washington.”
In fact, Trump’s unprecedented assassination order backfired at every level. He even managed briefly to unite a divided Iranian nation, caused the Iraqi government to demand a full U.S. troop withdrawal from that country, convinced Iran to end its commitment to restrain its enrichment of uranium, and undoubtedly incentivized both Tehran and Pyongyang not to commit to, or abide by, any future nuclear deals with Washington.
If George W. Bush and Barack Obama sowed the seeds of the American chaos machine, Donald Trump represents the first true madman at the wheel of state, thanks to his volatile temperament, profound ignorance, and crippling insecurity.
All of which raises another disturbing question: What if this administration’s chaos-sowing proves an end in itself, one that coheres with the millenarian fantasies of sections of the Republican Christian Right? After all, several key figures on the Trump team – notably Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and Vice President Mike Pence -- explicitly view the Middle East as evangelical Christians. Like a disturbing 73% of evangelicals (or 20% of the U.S. population), Pompeo and Pence believe that the Rapture (that is, the prophesied Christian end of the world) is likely to unfold in this generation and that a contemporary conflict in Israel and an impending war with Iran might actually be trigger events ushering in just such an apocalypse.
Donald Trump is, by all indications, far too self-serving, self-absorbed, and cynical to adhere to the eschatological blind-faith of the two Mikes. He clearly believes only in Donald Trump. And yet what a terrible irony it would be if, due to his perfect-storm disposition, he unwittingly ends up playing the role of the very Antichrist those evangelicals believe necessary to usher in end-times.
Given the foundations set in place for Trump by George W. Bush and Barack Obama and his capacity to throw caution to the wind, it’s hard to imagine a better candidate to play that role.
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