Rappelez-vous que c’était là que la guerre en Irak avait été gagnée

Le 19 novembre 2004, le lieutenant général Sattler, commandant le 1st Marine Expeditionnary Force, “proclama la victoire” à Falloujah, Irak, et tira avec enthousiasme les conclusions de la bataille qu’il venait de mener, qui avait consisté à écraser la ville sous les bombes puis à écraser ce qu’il en restait sous les chenilles de ses chars : « We feel right now that we have ... broken the back of the insurgency, and we have taken away this safe haven. »

Sattler poursuivit dans le même style difficilement imitable : « [I]n losing Fallujah, [you] lost your location and your means for command and control, you lose your lieutenants, which we have taken out of the Zarqawi network over the course of the last almost three months on a very precise basis. ... And you also lose the turf where you're operating, the town that you feel comfortable moving about in, where you know your way about. Now you're scattered. » Il tira la conclusion que tout le monde attendait, qui sonnait comme un happy end hollywoodien : « I believe, I personally believe, across the country, this is going to make it very hard for them to operate. And I'm hoping that we'll continue to breathe down their neck. » (On peut en lire encore plus sur la chute de Falloujah, sur le général “John Wayne” Sattler et le reste, dans un texte publié sur ce site.)

Huit mois plus tard, voici ce que le New York Times, si peu suspect d’hostilité au système américaniste et à ses généraux, écrit (le 15 juillet 2005) sur la situation à Falloujah:

« Transformed into a police state after last winter's siege, this should be the safest city in all of Iraq. Thousands of American and Iraqi troops live in crumbling buildings here and patrol streets laced with concertina wire. Any Iraqi entering the city must show a badge and undergo a search at one of six checkpoints. There is a 10 p.m. curfew.

» But the insurgency is rising from the rubble nevertheless, eight months after the American military killed as many as 1,500 Iraqis in a costly invasion that fanned anti-American passions across Iraq and the Arab world.

» Somewhere in the bowels of Falluja, the former guerrilla stronghold 35 miles west of Baghdad, where four American contractors were killed in an ambush, and the bodies of two were hanged from a bridge, in March 2004, insurgents are building suicide car bombs again.

» At least four have exploded in recent weeks, one of them killing six American troops, including four women. Two of five police forts being erected have been firebombed. Three members of the nascent, 21-seat city council have suddenly quit and another member has stopped attending meetings, presumably because they have been threatened. »

Et ainsi de suite…

Mis en ligne le 16 juillet 2005 à 05H00