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Nous allons confesser à nos lecteurs les détails de notre démarche.
• D’abord, ce texte de Gregg Easterbrook, dans le New York Times hebdo du 27 avril, présentant une analyse, non, un dithyrambe de la puissance militaire américaine : « American Power Moves Beyond the Mere Super ». L’abus du superlatif, parfois jusqu’à la nausée, nous arrêta. A propos de jugements tels que celui-ci, et tout cela venu évidemment de la victoire sur l’Irak :
« The American military is now the strongest the world has ever known, both in absolute terms and relative to other nations; stronger than the Wehrmacht in 1940, stronger than the legions at the height of Roman power. For years to come, no other nation is likely even to try to rival American might. »
• Nous-mêmes, pris de ce qui pourrait être décrit, pour un instant sans doute, comme une réaction passionnée, nous décidâmes de faire une analyse critique du texte de Easterbrook. Il nous semblait assez évident qu’un tel emportement d’hubris dût être vigoureusement combattu par quelques faits et jugements bien assénés. Notamment, il nous semblait que la victoire contre l’Irak, qui justifiait évidemment ce déchaînement, dût être mise dans une perspective qui permettrait de nuancer l’enthousiasme sans mesure que montrait Easterbrook.
• En même temps, pour en mieux connaître, nous explorâmes ce qui pouvait y avoir d’accessible sur Internet de Gregg Easterbrook, journaliste à The New Republic (TNR, hebdomadaire libéral US, c’est-à-dire progressiste, mais ayant adopté la cause de la guerre à outrance depuis le Kosovo ; Easterbrook est un de ces “humanitaristes-interventionnistes” américains dont l’enthousiasme sans limite pour la puissance militaire déchaînée des USA nous paraît, même aujourd’hui, un sujet de constant étonnement). Nous consultâmes d’autres textes de Easterbrook publié par TNR.
• La lecture de “Tactical Advantage”, du 3 avril 2003, nous laissa complètement stupéfaits. On ne pourrait rêver texte plus complètement contradictoire dans l’esprit du précédent cité (en réalité, texte du New York Times publié 20 jours plus tard). “Tactical Advantage” réduit à peu de choses la victoire sur le point d’être remportée par les Américains (et les Britanniques) et fait par conséquent de l’exercice de l'hubris déchaîné du 27 quelque chose de complètement gratuit, sans cause rationnelle, quelque chose de complètement suspect du point de vue intellectuel. Extraits du texte de TNR du 3 avril :
« The second thought that comes to mind at this moment is that though the assault on Iraq is going extremely well and U.S. and British forces are conducting themselves with exemplary honor, we should not see this for anything more than it is. Iraq was a sitting duck. Relative to an attacker, few nations have ever been more vulnerable.
[...]
» First, consider Iraq's incredibly weak tactical position. (...)Ringed by enemy ships and enemy military bases, Iraq practically has PLEASE ATTACK ME written on its borders.
» Next, Iraq has no regional allies--for that matter, no allies period. (...) But tactically this leaves Iraq utterly alone in resisting an attacking nation with more than 10 times its population and 100 times its military budget. Such imbalance has known few precedents in military history.
» Finally, Iraq's military has been weakened from without by a decade of sanctions and from within by Saddam's madness, from which his army and its officer corps has hardly been spared. (...) Is there any other nation, of pressing concern to international policy at least, in such an exposed position as Iraq? »
... Et ainsi de suite. Easterbrook va même jusqu’à avancer qu’une intervention au Rwanda en 1994-95 aurait été beaucoup plus difficile et coûteuse pour les USA que leur intervention contre l’Irak, qu’elle aurait même été impossible. C’est tout à fait notre appréciation. Sans doute, s’il en était informé, Easterbrook jugerait-il comme une admirable performance militaire, peut-être plus significative que l’attaque contre l’Irak, que les Français soient parvenus à maintenir un calme approximatif pendant plus de 3 mois déjà en Côte d’Ivoire, avec 3.000 soldats et un équipement léger ? C’est aussi notre jugement, et c’est autant pour les accusations de lâcheté et de pacifisme décadent dont la presse US accable la France.
Par conséquent, en l’absence d’autres éléments, nous renonçons à expliquer une telle contradiction dans l’esprit d'un même analyste, à 20 jours d’intervalle, sur le même sujet fondamentalement, sinon par des hypothèses assez communes sur la vénalité des gens et des journalistes précisément, sur la corruption intellectuelle, sur l’impressibilité d’auteurs dont le bagage et les références nous faisaient croire qu’ils savent garder leur sang-froid. C’est suggérer qu’il existerait, aux États-Unis, aujourd’hui, un vertigineux problème dans le domaine de l’information et de l’analyse politique et militaire. (On ajoutera, pour compléter l’appréciation, que le texte du 27 qui fait l’apologie de la puissance militaire US s’appuie sur quelques références, explicites pour nous, à la campagne irakienne mais se garde d’une référence catégorique à cette campagne, si complètement dévaluée à presque rien du tout dans le texte du 3 avril. Cette prudence cousue de fil blanc n’ajoute rien à la gloire de l’auteur mais fait penser qu’il mesure l’“évolution” de son jugement.)
Ces deux textes méritent une lecture intéressée, l’un à la suite de l’autre, commençant par le dithyrambe et achevant par le terre à terre, en se disant que, dans le second, Easterbrook fait un bon travail d’analyste militaire. On croirait, c’est tout dire, qu’il n’est pas Américain, — ou, dans tous les cas, pas “bon” Américain selon le cathéchisme post-9/11. Peut-être quelqu’un lui en a-t-il fait la remarque entre temps, ce qui expliquerait le texte du 27 avril.
Ci-dessous, à la suite, les deux textes sont reproduits.
By Gregg Easterbrook, April 27, 2003, The New York Times
Stealth drones, G.P.S.-guided smart munitions that hit precisely where aimed; antitank bombs that guide themselves; space-relayed data links that allow individual squad leaders to know exactly where American and opposition forces are during battle — the United States military rolled out all this advanced technology, and more, in its lightning conquest of Iraq. No other military is even close to the United States. The American military is now the strongest the world has ever known, both in absolute terms and relative to other nations; stronger than the Wehrmacht in 1940, stronger than the legions at the height of Roman power. For years to come, no other nation is likely even to try to rival American might.
Which means: the global arms race is over, with the United States the undisputed heavyweight champion. Other nations are not even trying to match American armed force, because they are so far behind they have no chance of catching up. The great-powers arms race, in progress for centuries, has ended with the rest of the world conceding triumph to the United States.
Now only a nuclear state, like, perhaps, North Korea, has any military leverage against the winner.
Paradoxically, the runaway American victory in the conventional arms race might inspire a new round of proliferation of atomic weapons. With no hope of matching the United States plane for plane, more countries may seek atomic weapons to gain deterrence.
North Korea might have been moved last week to declare that it has an atomic bomb by the knowledge that it has no hope of resisting American conventional power. If it becomes generally believed that possession of even a few nuclear munitions is enough to render North Korea immune from American military force, other nations — Iran is an obvious next candidate — may place renewed emphasis on building them.
For the extent of American military superiority has become almost impossible to overstate. The United States sent five of its nine supercarrier battle groups to the region for the Iraq assault. A tenth Nimitz-class supercarrier is under construction. No other nation possesses so much as one supercarrier, let alone nine battle groups ringed by cruisers and guarded by nuclear submarines.
Russia has one modern aircraft carrier, the Admiral Kuznetsov, but it has about half the tonnage of an American supercarrier, and has such a poor record that it rarely leaves port. The former Soviet navy did preliminary work on a supercarrier, but abandoned the project in 1992. Britain and France have a few small aircraft carriers. China decided against building one last year.
Any attempt to build a fleet that threatens the Pentagon's would be pointless, after all, because if another nation fielded a threatening vessel, American attack submarines would simply sink it in the first five minutes of any conflict. (The new Seawolf-class nuclear-powered submarine is essentially the futuristic supersub of ''The Hunt for Red October'' made real.) Knowing this, all other nations have conceded the seas to the United States, a reason American forces can sail anywhere without interference. The naval arms race — a principal aspect of great-power politics for centuries — is over.
United States air power is undisputed as well, with more advanced fighters and bombers than those of all other nations combined. The United States possesses three stealth aircraft (the B-1 and B-2 bombers and the F-117 fighter) with two more (the F-22 and F-35 fighters) developed and awaiting production funds. No other nation even has a stealth aircraft on the drawing board. A few nations have small numbers of heavy bombers; the United States has entire wings of heavy bombers.
No other nation maintains an aerial tanker fleet similar to that of the United States; owing to tankers, American bombers can operate anywhere in the world. No other nation has anything like the American AWACS plane, which provides exceptionally detailed radar images of the sky above battles, or the newer JSTARS plane, which provides exceptionally detailed radar images of the ground.
No other nation has air-to-air missiles or air-to-ground smart munitions of the accuracy, or numbers, of the United States. This month, for example, in the second attempt to kill Saddam Hussein, just 12 minutes passed between when a B-1 received the target coordinates and when the bomber released four smart bombs aimed to land just 50 feet and a few seconds apart. All four hit where they were supposed to.
American aerial might is so great that adversaries don't even try to fly. Serbia kept its planes on the ground during the Kosovo conflict of 1999; in recent fighting in Iraq, not a single Iraqi fighter rose to oppose United States aircraft. The governments of the world now know that if they try to launch a fighter against American air power, their planes will be blown to smithereens before they finish retracting their landing gear. The aerial arms race, a central facet of the last 50 years, is over.
The American lead in ground forces is not uncontested — China has a large standing army — but is large enough that the ground arms race might end, too. The United States now possesses about 9,000 M1 Abrams tanks, by far the world's strongest armored force. The Abrams cannon and fire-control system is so extraordinarily accurate that in combat gunners rarely require more than one shot to destroy an enemy tank. No other nation is currently building or planning a comparable tank force. Other governments know this would be pointless, since even if they had advanced tanks, the United States would destroy them from the air.
The American lead in electronics is also huge. Much of the ''designating'' of targets in the recent Iraq assault was done by advanced electronics on drones like the Global Hawk, which flies at 60,000 feet, far beyond the range of antiaircraft weapons. So sophisticated are the sensors and data links that make Global Hawk work that it might take a decade for another nation to field a similar drone — and by then, the United States is likely to have leapfrogged ahead to something better.
As The New York Times Magazine reported last Sunday, the United States is working on unmanned, remote-piloted drone fighter planes that will be both relatively low-cost and extremely hard to shoot down, and small drone attack helicopters that will precede troops into battle. No other nation is even close to the electronics and data-management technology of these prospective weapons. The Pentagon will have a monopoly on advanced combat drones for years.
An electronics arms race may continue in some fashion because electronics are cheaper than ships or planes. But the United States holds such an imposing lead that it is unlikely to be lapped for a long time.
Further, the United States holds an overwhelming lead in military use of space. Not only does the Pentagon command more and better reconnaissance satellites than all the rest of the world combined, American forces have begun using space-relayed data in a significant way. Space ''assets'' will eventually be understood to have been critical to the lightning conquest of Iraq, and the American lead in this will only grow, since the Air Force now has the second-largest space budget in the world, after NASA's.
This huge military lead is partly because of money. Last year American military spending exceeded that of all other NATO states, Russia, China, Japan, Iraq and North Korea combined, according to the Center for Defense Information, a nonpartisan research group that studies global security. This is another area where all other nations must concede to the United States, for no other government can afford to try to catch up.
The runaway advantage has been called by some excessive, yet it yields a positive benefit. Annual global military spending, stated in current dollars, peaked in 1985, at $1.3 trillion, and has been declining since, to $840 billion in 2002. That's a drop of almost half a trillion dollars in the amount the world spent each year on arms. Other nations accept that the arms race is over.
The United States military reinforces its pre-eminence by going into combat. Rightly or wrongly, the United States fights often; each fight becomes a learning opportunity for troops and a test of technology. No other military currently has the real-world experience of the United States.
There is also the high quality — in education and motivation — of its personnel. This lead has grown as the United States has integrated women into most combat roles, doubling the talent base on which recruiters can draw.
The American edge does not render its forces invincible: the expensive Apache attack helicopter, for example, fared poorly against routine small-arms fire in Iraq. More important, overwhelming power hardly insures that the United States will get its way in world affairs. Force is just one aspect of international relations, while experience has shown that military power can solve only military problems, not political ones.
North Korea now stares into the barrel of the strongest military ever assembled, and yet may be able to defy the United States, owing to nuclear deterrence. As the global arms race ends with the United States so far ahead no other nation even tries to be America's rival, the result may be a world in which Washington has historically unparalleled power, but often cannot use it.
Gregg Easterbrook is a senior editor of The New Republic and a contributing editor of The Atlantic Monthly. His next book, ''The Progress Paradox,'' will be published this fall by Random House.
[Notre recommendation est que ce texte doit être lu avec la mention classique à l'esprit, — “Disclaimer: In accordance with 17 U.S.C. 107, this material is distributed without profit or payment to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving this information for non-profit research and educational purposes only.”.]
By Gregg Easterbrook, 4 April, 2003, The New Republic
U.S. forces have now broken through the Karbala Gap and are converging on Baghdad. Presumably, all those commentators who were wringing their hands about why can't we capture an entire country in 20 minutes will flip-flop and begin gushing over the incredible effectiveness of the assault.
(Wednesday night all the cable talking heads were expressing shock that a U.S. fighter had been shot down. This is tragic if the pilot has died, but distress over a single aircraft lost? At Midway, among the greatest victories in American history, 150 U.S. planes fell in one day. Lack of military-history perspective in the last two weeks has mind-bending.)
With the gates of Baghdad in sight, Best Laid Plans now ponders two things. First, as Uwe Reinhardt of Princeton has pointed out, is that the deaths of Iraqi combatants, whom U.S. and British units are now slaying — as they must — with great efficiency, ought to be cause for sorrow.
Though valid military targets, most Iraqi combatants are forced conscripts who want no fight. They're poorly trained and poorly equipped, with almost no chance of survival should they be foolish enough to discharge any weapon: The U.S. military locates and obliterates sources of fire with almost robotic competence. Most Iraqi combatants are in uniform not through voluntary choice, as is the case with all U.S. and British combatants, but because they were impressed. Iraqi men cannot refuse conscription, and face summary execution if they try to return to their families. It's awful when even one Iraqi civilian dies, but civilian deaths are occurring in small numbers by the standards of warfare. Iraqi combatants are dying en masse. This conflict must end soon so that the United States can stop doing what is, by the logic of war, entirely legal, proper, fair, and necessary — killing Iraqi soldiers.
The second thought that comes to mind at this moment is that though the assault on Iraq is going extremely well and U.S. and British forces are conducting themselves with exemplary honor, we should not see this for anything more than it is. Iraq was a sitting duck. Relative to an attacker, few nations have ever been more vulnerable.
First, consider Iraq's incredibly weak tactical position. The United States has several major bases on the country's border. Attacking units could mass at those bases in a manner of our choosing, building up without limit and in conditions of relative comfort (food, electricity, unlimited supplies). Iraq also has two bodies of ''blue water'' within reasonable flying distance, allowing U.S. naval units to pull close to the target. Six U.S. supercarrier battle groups--more sea power than is possessed by the rest of the world combined — now sail within tactical range of Iraq. Ringed by enemy ships and enemy military bases, Iraq practically has PLEASE ATTACK ME written on its borders.
Next, Iraq has no regional allies — for that matter, no allies period. (France is not an official ally of Iraq, and a fickle ally in any event.) Because Iraq has no regional ally, no nation has opposed the American buildup. Our supply convoys have not been fired upon; submarines do not threaten our supercarriers. Turkey declined to assist in the assault on Iraq, but no regional power opposed it. No global power, not Russia or China, threatened the United States with any penalty should the attack proceed. Iraq has no allies because its regime is beneath contempt, and even other autocrats know this; even Albania under Hoxha had allies! But tactically this leaves Iraq utterly alone in resisting an attacking nation with more than 10 times its population and 100 times its military budget. Such imbalance has known few precedents in military history.
Finally, Iraq's military has been weakened from without by a decade of sanctions and from within by Saddam's madness, from which his army and its officer corps has hardly been spared. Iraq is now so infirm militarily it cannot restrain the coalition by threatening to harm neighbors, as North Korea can restrain the United States by threatening to harm South Korea.
Is there any other nation, of pressing concern to international policy at least, in such an exposed position as Iraq? North Korean can blackmail South Korea. Iran is far larger than Iraq; is farther from the blue water; has vast areas of border on which there are no U.S. bases; and enjoys quasi-ally status with Russia, whose personnel within Iran we dare not put at risk. Syria has more-secure borders than Iraq, and the ability to threaten Israel with retaliation. Afghanistan is vulnerable in ways similar to Iraq but, now that the United States is Kabul's protector, has no worries in balance-of-power terms.
Contrast the weak tactical position of Iraq with what might have happened had the United States intervened in Rwanda in 1994 — a worthwhile comparison because it has become standard for opponents of current action against Iraq to ask why the United States moves against Saddam but did not against the Rwandan genocide. Forget the politics; think about the tactical differences.
The nearest U.S. military base to Rwanda is almost 2,000 miles distant. Rwanda is landlocked and the closest blue water almost 700 miles away, about the maximum range of air-refueled carrier-based jets and much too far for carrier-borne helicopters. To send a heavy military force into Rwanda, the United States would have needed permission from Uganda, Tanzania, or another Rwandan border state to build an operations base. Even assuming such permission had been granted, several months would have been blazing speed for the preparations, and that's about how long the genocide lasted.
Had we tried to act right away, we could have bombed — what, exactly? The CIA has studied Iraq for years; in Rwanda we would not have had the slightest idea what to shoot at. Even a limited intervention to seize Kigali airport and fly in troops would have been a steep challenge unless one of Rwanda's neighbors let us use its airfields for staging. Assuming the Kigali airport was in our hands, we would still have needed weeks to airlift enough force to dispatch units into the countryside. (Could lightly armed fast-reaction companies have been sent in alone and asked to be superheroes? You may recall that we tried that in Somalia.) The Rwandan genocide might have been mitigated had the United States, or United Nations, flexed muscle; there are reasons to believe this would have helped. But tactically, Rwanda in 1994 was far more secure than Iraq in 2003.
In many ways this is why, of the remaining dictators in the world, the United States attacked Saddam: because it's practical. This does not diminish the valor of the attacking forces, nor the benefit to history and to the Iraqi people, if Iraq truly is set free. Washington and Pentagon policymakers should simply bear in mind that we may never again have a problem nation so completely over the barrel.
[Notre recommendation est que ce texte doit être lu avec la mention classique à l'esprit, — “Disclaimer: In accordance with 17 U.S.C. 107, this material is distributed without profit or payment to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving this information for non-profit research and educational purposes only.”.]
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