Swisswatch
09/02/2007
Effectivement: Amusant! Ou terrifiant, si l’on se place du côté de celui qui observe l’état dans lequel se trouvent les médias aujourd’hui. Voici une rédaction qui a donné l’“imprimatur” à un article, sans se rendre compte que sa conclusion prouvait le contraire de son contenu.
Propagande dites-vous. Je préfère penser que l’auteur se réjouit de sa petite farce!
swisswatch
09/02/2007
Je crois me souvenir avoir lu, voici un an ou plus, de votre plume, l’opinion qui disait en gros ceci: “Les USA sont un empire en déclin et ils se montreront brutaux dans leur chute”. De fait, ils se montrent brutaux. Et stupides! Ils font feu de tout bois. En voulant imposer ces radars et ces missiles dont l’efficacité est pour le moins alléatoire, ils montrent à leurs concurrents leurs limites (celles des USA) et par déduction, leurs faiblesses.
L’Iran et la Corée-du-Nord ne se sentent certainement pas concernés par ces bases militaires, pas plus que ne le sont les véritables “destinataires”, la Russie et la Chine. Pour ces dernières, ces bases accentuent la visibilité de la tactique US. Les Etat-Uniens avancent, positionnent ouvertement leurs pions. Mais le choix des pions est mauvais. Il indique que l’assaillant n’en a pas d’autre à sa disposition.
Les USA prennent le risque de se mettre la “vieille” Europe encore plus à dos, pour un gain qui ne peut être que nul, ou, pire pour ce qui risque de se transformer en “blowback”. En voulant montrer leur force, ils montrent leurs limites technologiques. Les adversaires n’ont qu’à contrer et les spectateurs (les alliés et autres assujettis) perdent de plus en plus confiance (pour les premiers) et crainte (pour les autres).
Lambrechts Francis
09/02/2007
Bill Bonner http://www.la-chronique-agora.com/lca.php?id=1029
... Le Financial Times nous rappelle qui manipule l’oseille :
“L’administration Bush s’est livrée à une fièvre dépensière de cinq milliards de dollars en Irak en 2004, six semaines seulement avant de remettre le contrôle gouvernemental entre les mains des Irakiens, selon un législateur démocrate enquêtant sur les paiements”.
“Des sommes énormes de dollars ont été distribuées, parfois même directement en billets, à l’arrière de camions, a-t-on affirmé”. M. Paul Bremer, qui était de quart en Irak à l’époque, admet qu’il y a peut-être eu quelques bourdes : “je reconnais que j’ai fait des erreurs, et que, rétrospectivement, j’aurais pris certaines décisions différemment. Mais dans l’ensemble, nous avons fait de gros progrès dans des conditions parmi les plus difficiles qu’on puisse imaginer”.
De quel progrès parle-t-il, voilà qui est difficile à voir. Apparemment, l’argent était redistribué si paresseusement qu’une bonne partie a terminé entre les mains de l’ennemi—quel qu’il soit. Et on ne parle pas là de petites sommes. La quantité en question se monte à 20 milliards de dollars, dont 12 milliards en liquide. Comment peut-on distribuer 12 milliards en liquide ? Cela fait 120 millions de billets de 100 $. Même si on en donnait un par seconde, pendant des journées de travail de huit heures… il faudrait trois ans pour en répartir la totalité.
Selon l’article, les Etats-Unis ont, dans les faits, apporté 360 tonnes de cash en Irak. Qui irait faire une chose aussi stupide, a voulu savoir Henry Waxman, représentant du Congrès US. Nous supposons que Waxman essayait seulement de faire le malin devant les électeurs ; il est à Washington depuis assez longtemps pour connaître la réponse.
Greney Eric
09/02/2007
The Pentagon\‘s not-so-little secret
As the president and Republicans continue to hype the surge—and stifle debate about it—Bush\‘s own war planners are preparing for failure in Iraq.
By Sidney Blumenthal
Feb. 08, 2007 | Deep within the bowels of the Pentagon, policy planners are conducting secret meetings to discuss what to do in the worst-case scenario in Iraq about a year from today if and when President Bush\‘s escalation of more than 20,000 troops fails, a participant in those discussions told me. None of those who are taking part in these exercises, shielded from the public view and the immediate scrutiny of the White House, believes that the so-called surge will succeed. On the contrary, everyone thinks it will not only fail to achieve its aims but also accelerate instability by providing a glaring example of U.S. incapacity and incompetence.
The profoundly pessimistic thinking that permeates the senior military and the intelligence community, however, is forbidden in the sanitized atmosphere of mind-cure boosterism that surrounds Bush. \“He\‘s tried this two times—it\‘s failed twice,\” Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi said on Jan. 24 about the \“surge\” tactic. \“I asked him at the White House, \‘Mr. President, why do you think this time it\‘s going to work?\’ And he said, \‘Because I told them it had to.\’\” She repeated his words: \”\‘I told them that they had to.\’ That was the end of it. That\‘s the way it is.\”
http://www.salon.com/opinion/blumenthal/2007/02/08/gop_iraq/print.html
+++++++++
Pentagon Prepares Iraq Disaster Plan
Salon | Sidney Blumenthal | Posted February 8, 2007 01:44 PM
Deep within the bowels of the Pentagon, policy planners are conducting secret meetings to discuss what to do in the worst-case scenario in Iraq about a year from today if and when President Bush\‘s escalation of more than 20,000 troops fails, a participant in those discussions told me. None of those who are taking part in these exercises, shielded from the public view and the immediate scrutiny of the White House, believes that the so-called surge will succeed. On the contrary, everyone thinks it will not only fail to achieve its aims but also accelerate instability by providing a glaring example of U.S. incapacity and incompetence.
The profoundly pessimistic thinking that permeates the senior military and the intelligence community, however, is forbidden in the sanitized atmosphere of mind-cure boosterism that surrounds Bush. \“He\‘s tried this two times—it\‘s failed twice,\” Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi said on Jan. 24 about the \“surge\” tactic. \“I asked him at the White House, \‘Mr. President, why do you think this time it\‘s going to work?\’ And he said, \‘Because I told them it had to.\’\” She repeated his words: \”\‘I told them that they had to.\’ That was the end of it. That\‘s the way it is.\”
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2007/02/08/pentagon-prepares-iraq-di_n_40748.html
Jean-Paul DANGMANN
08/02/2007
Une des principales raisons de la défaite des Soviétiques en Afghanistan, est le fait que leurs hélicoptères tombaient comme des mouches, abattus par les missiles Stinger, fournis par les USA aux insurgés Afghans, dont Bin-Laden. Les routes n’étant plus praticables, embuscades, bombes artisanales, mines, l’Union Soviétique n’était plus en mesure de déplacer ses troupes, d’où l’incapacité a s’assurer un minimum de maitrise sur le conflit.
BS
08/02/2007
Si les américains veulent la peau des Iraniens, c’est principalement parce que ceux-ci veulent et commencent à vendre leur pétrole et leur gaz en euro.
Le passage à l’euro comme monnaie d’échange internationale, en commençant par le marché du pétrole sonnerait le glas de l’économie américaine.
C’est à mon sens unes des principales raisons de la guerre en Irak (Sadam avait commencé à vendre son pétrole en euro) et cela risque de déclencher la guerre avec l’Iran. (Pour la Russie, c’est trop tard).
Et cela totalement contre nos intérêts européens. Suivre les américains en Irak et Iran, c’est vraiment se tirer une balle dans le pied (voire pire !) pour nous autres européens.
Schnetzler
08/02/2007
Je suis en parfait accord avec la remarque précédente et je vais même plus loin. Depuis plus de quinze ans, aux Etats-Unis et ailleurs, on n’imagine plus que des luttes à dix ou cent contre un, face à des adversaires incapables de riposter. Une telle attitude n’est pas du “virtualisme” mais la manifestation de l’ego démesuré des “démocraties” (détentrices de toutes les vertus), ego comparable à celui prévalant il y a un siècle.
Quant aux faiblesses avouées du F-22, elles sont hallucinantes. Il serait impuissant face à un brouillage “accidentel” ! Qu’en serait-il alors face une action ennemie spécifiquement dirigée contre lui ? Si le F-22 est inapte au combat en Irak (pour les raisons citées) alors il est encore plus inapte à des engagements dans un conflit conventionnel.
Tout cela dépasse donc de loin le principe d’un conflit C4G. Une guerre ce n’est pas un tir au pigeon. L’ennemi riposte.
Fred., de L.
08/02/2007
Dites. Les missiles. Ils viennent bien d’Iran ? Histoire qu’on puisse aller leur casser la gueule à ces foutus iraniens qui empêchent les américains de ramener la paix tranquillement…
geo
08/02/2007
Frapper lIran ?
Par Laurent Murawiec à Washington © Metula News Agency 02 07
Les Etats-Unis en font beaucoup. Envoi dune vingtaine de milliers de soldats en Irak, pression plutôt réussie sur le premier ministre bagdadi al-Maliki pour quil cesse de nêtre que le pantin des extrémistes chiites. Attaques menées contre les nids urbains de miliciens chiites de Muqtada al-Sadr, nomination de laudacieux général David Petraeus à la tête des forces américaines et coalisées en ce qui concerne lIrak. Envoi dun porte-avion de plus vers le Golfe persique, avec toute son armada accompagnatrice dotée dune force de frappe considérable, sous la houlette de lamiral Fallon, un as de laéronavale aux talents certains de coordination de frappes aériennes lourdes. Dénonciations appuyées et multiples du rôle offensif de lIran et de ses services dans les rebellions irakiennes, arrestations en Irak dagents iraniens, officiers de la « Force al-Quds », forces spéciales iraniennes
Va-t-on, la question est dans tous les esprits, vers une intervention américaine contre lIran ? Avant de répondre, examinons le paysage
Dans la région, voit graduellement le jour un Axe sunnite, quon pourrait baptiser coalition des effrayés : les despotes arabes, saoudiens, égyptiens et autres, que la montée du danger perso-chiite fait trembler. Il ne sagit plus du simple désir, chez eux, de fouler aux pieds les hérétiques, comme leur compère Saddam lavait si bien fait, mais déchapper aux ambitions hégémoniques de lIran ayatollesque.
Lacquisition dun arsenal nucléaire et balistique par les ayatollahs, la montée en puissance du Hezbollah au Liban, qui prépare sans se cacher le coup dEtat, ou, sil échoue, la guerre civile, la prise de contrôle du Hamas par lIran et la Syrie : cest la grand peur pour les pétromonarchies sunnites du Golfe ; cest elle qui a motivée les gestes remarqués et renouvelés contre lIran, sous formes de fatwas saoudiennes contre Téhéran et le Hezbollah, de rencontres à peine secrètes entre responsables israéliens et saoudiens, du soutien apporté à Abou Mazen contre le Hamas. Ils ont très peur de lapocalypse chiite et de limplantation durable et agressive des agents de la puissance iranienne sur les rives de la Méditerranée.
En Arabie, autant que lon puisse déchiffrer les signes ésotériques qui émanent, comme des signaux de fumée de Peaux-rouges à travers la prairie, de lopaque dynastie des Al-Saoud, un clash sévère a opposé ceux qui - tel lancien patron des services secrets Turki, qui vient dabandonner, après 18 mois seulement, ses fonctions de « Ministre des Affaires Américaines » (ambassadeur à Washington) - voulaient flirter avec un Iran ascendant, et ceux qui - tel son prédécesseur et directeur du Conseil national de sécurité, Bandar, soutenu par le roi Abdallah - ont plus peur de Téhéran que de Washington, ou même dIsraël (ou qui plutôt voient pour lheure plus de bénéfices à rameuter le voisinage contre lIran que contre Israël).
Riyad, soutenu par le pétro-potentat koweitien, a mis en uvre un nouveau cours pétrolier destiné à étouffer économiquement un Iran totalement dépendant du revenu pétrolier. La chute libre du prix du baril, passé de plus de 75 dollars à 50 en lespace de quelques mois, reflète un accroissement des pompages dans le Golfe arabe. Sur un marché saturé, le prix du brut a donc chuté dun tiers. La perte de revenu est absorbable par les pétroliers du Golfe, mais pas par lIran populeux. Les Saoudiens affaiblissent par la même occasion leur autre grand ennemi : les investissements américains en formes alternatives dénergie. Le budget prévisionnel koweitien de lan prochain se fonde sur un prix de 26 dollars le baril ! A 50 dollars et moins, les caisses iraniennes se vident, et la marge de manuvre du régime sétrécit.
On rapporte ici et là, surtout depuis les récentes « élections » en Iran, que les « modérés » y auraient repris la main, que le Guide suprême Khamenei, appuyé par lex-président Hachémi Rafsandjani, voudrait reprendre les rênes, de peur que lextrémisme illimité manifesté par Ahmadinejad ne finisse, à coup de provocations inutiles, par amener la formation dune grande et agressive coalition contre lIran, prélude à un assaut contre son programme nucléaire.
Il est vrai que certains ayatollahs milliardaires tiennent à leurs privilèges, alors quAhmadinejad-le-maigre ne tient quà ses ferveurs mystico-assassines. Noublions pas, néanmoins, que les ayatollahs sont passés maîtres dans la science de la manipulation politique, celle quils ont apprise des Soviétiques : remuer bien haut la marionnette « modérée » pour entortiller les gogos (qui se pressent en masse navrante du côté occidental : il nest pire sourd ) et gagner du temps pour les pas-modérés-du tout qui utilisent les faux-modérés comme écran de fumée.
Depuis de nombreuses années, en Iran, laccident dhélicoptère est le moyen favori de la purge politique, surtout envers les dirigeants militaires ou des Pasdaran. Cest un progrès considérable par rapport à la pendaison, et cela évite les frais de torture. Donc, à lannonce quAhmadinejad a été victime dun regrettable désastre aérien, nous saurons que Khamenei et les pseudo-modérés sont sérieux - mais pas avant. Avant cela, ils continueront de jouer sur les deux tableaux, et dutiliser lépouvantail mystico-assassin pour effrayer les gobe-mouches tout en secouant les plumes de la coiffe modérée pour appâter les mêmes.
Mais leur Iran est perclus de trous et de vulnérabilités : le pays à léconomie nationalisée et bureaucratisée est à demi en ruine. Pour financer le programme nucléaire, les investissements lourds, les achats de matériels sensibles, pour maintenir un niveau darmement suffisant, acheter une partie de la population pauvre à coup de distributions populistes et de prébendes, et subventionner la révolution islamique, il faut des fonds considérables - Téhéran comptait sur le pétrole. Par ailleurs, lIran ne possède aucune capacité de raffiner le pétrole en essence, et dépend donc totalement des importations, ce qui a poussé Ahmadinejad à lancer un lourd programme de conversion au gaz naturel du parc automobile. Le programme était viable à un niveau élevé de revenu pétrolier, mais devient un terrible fardeau au prix actuel.
Autre vulnérabilité iranienne, les flux financiers. En la matière, les Américains ont lancé discrètement une campagne visant à affaiblir lIran en lisolant financièrement : on fait savoir aux établissements financiers internationaux qui travaillent avec les banques iraniennes quils seront mis sur liste noire par les autorités fédérales américaines sils continuent. La gêne et même la pénurie causée à Téhéran sont sérieuses, et prometteuses, même si lIran tend à utiliser leuro plus que le dollar pour se prémunir. Washington essaie également de coopérer avec lUnion européenne. Mais décider à 27 est une affaire lente et difficile, dautant que lUE ne sest pas dotée des instruments indispensables à lidentification et au ciblage des établissements financiers délictueux : Washington doit parler à 27 Etats plutôt quà une seule instance. Les Américains ont donc été forcés de travailler plutôt avec les banques européennes. Téhéran a besoin de crédit, et peut de moins en moins en obtenir.
Finalement, la vulnérabilité technologique concerne non seulement les techniques du nucléaire et de la missilerie, mais également lextraction pétrolière et gazière. Il y a besoin en la demeure dune vaste coopération internationale pour limiter au maximum les fuites technologiques en direction de lIran. Plus il sera difficile et coûteux pour lIran de se procurer ces technologies de pointe, plus difficile deviendra sa situation économique.
On ne manque donc pas de moyens de serrer la vis au régime des ayatollahs. Une certaine volonté se manifeste à Washington à cet égard, mais cest bien peu et cest bien tard : découvrir aujourdhui que lIran est lun des grands soutiens des insurrections irakiennes, cest faire preuve dune étrange cécité, ou de vision différée, puisque le soutien a commencé dès la chute de Saddam. Pourquoi avoir perdu trois ans ? Découvrir et dénoncer, de même, les interférences syriennes, après avoir passé trois ans à faire semblant de ne rien voir afin de ne pas avoir à intervenir, cest faire preuve dune extraordinaire pusillanimité. De même, il y a plus de deux ans, le magazine Time, se basant entre autres sur des rapports du renseignement militaire américain, dressait le portrait de la stratégie iranienne en Irak : les Gardes révolutionnaires iraniens (Pasdaran) y avaient créé un réseau de près de 300 tueurs opérant en Irak, divisés en 17 groupes de fabricants de bombes et descadrons de la mort, formés par le Hezbollah et les Pasdaran, abrités à Sadr City, le bastion de Muqtada al-Sadr, et dirigés par Abou Moustafa al-Sheibani (Time, 14 août 2005, « La guerre secrète de lIran pour conquérir lIrak »). On en savait bien plus - qua t-on fait ? Ali al-Dabbagh, porte-parole du gouvernement irakien, vient de déclarer à la BBC que les terroristes basés en Syrie étaient responsable de la moitié des attentats commis à Bagdad ; rien de neuf à cela : pourquoi navoir pas fait payer Damas plus tôt ?
Bush a cru pouvoir faire la « guerre au terrorisme » en isolant les fronts, en choisissant une cible puis lautre, sans comprendre un instant que le « front » de la guerre nest pas territorial. On ne pouvait mener la guerre en Irak sans traiter dune manière ou dune autre les trois grands voisins de lIrak qui soutiennent les insurrections chiites ou sunnites ou les deux : Iran, Syrie, Arabie saoudite. Mais encore aurait-il fallu que Bush ôte ses illères et refuse découter les propos lénifiants de ses conseillers chéris, Condi Rice, George Tenet à la CIA, et bien dautres. Les ennemis sur laction desquels on faisait limpasse se sentaient dautant plus encouragés, par cette insolite immunité, à sattaquer aux forces américaines en Irak. LArabie saoudite continua de plus belle à y exporter ses jihadis et à les financer, pas trop afin de ne pas provoquer une riposte, assez pour affaiblir les Américains ; lIran fournissait les insurgés en armements, les formait à la guérilla façon Hezbollah, et appliquait sa stratégie « à la libanaise », tout en éliminant les dirigeants chiites qui lui déplaisaient et en promouvant ses propres pions ; la Syrie ouvrait toutes les portes aux jihadis désireux dentrer en Irak. Les insurrections faisaient rage grâce à leurs sanctuaires, et les sanctuaires étaient protégés par lauto-aveuglement diplomatique de ladministration Bush !
Ce dernier aura donc, depuis 2001, mené de front plusieurs politiques contradictoires. LAmérique a été plongée, en dépit delle-même, dans un nouveau conflit mondial dont elle na pas fini dapprendre les règles. Ladministration Bush reflète létat desprit composite de lAmérique, engluée dans le « politiquement correct » davant le 11 septembre, « lesprit du 10 septembre » comme lont nommé certains, et dune Amérique qui veut contre-attaquer, sans savoir forcément comment procéder. Les règles du jeu « du 12 septembre » sont à inventer. Mais le président sest entouré dune coalition « du 10 » et « du 12 » sans opter fermement pour lune ou lautre date. La confusion règne à Washington. Lélectorat - qui le lui reprochera - veut des directions claires. Il avait donné beaucoup de crédit à Bush, mais pas un chèque en blanc. Il a repris ses billes en novembre dernier, tant il est vrai que ce sont les Républicains qui ont perdu, et non les Démocrates qui ont gagné.
Les media, ivres de leur puissance depuis la fin de la guerre du Vietnam et le Watergate, forts dune impunité absolue et dune puissance de manipulation formidable, ont mené une guerre implacable contre Bush. Les élus de lexécutif et du législatif sont soumis au suffrage universel ; les sociétés cotées en bourse à la censure de leurs actionnaires et aux décisions des acheteurs ; les media sont incontrôlés, et, idéologiquement, très à gauche : neuf journalistes sur dix se définissent eux-mêmes ainsi. Leur hypercritique malveillante étend un parapluie protecteur au-dessus de tous les ennemis des Etats-Unis. Lincapacité de ladministration à bien concevoir sa stratégie et à lénoncer clairement a laissé le champ libre à laristocratie médiatique dont le fiel se répand quotidiennement. La confusion qui règne au sein de la population américaine tient en grande partie à ce double mouvement.
Bush est, nul ne lignore, un canard plutôt boiteux : il cessera formellement dêtre président le 20 janvier 2009, mais cèdera son pouvoir de décision à son successeur élu dès le premier mercredi de novembre 2008. Privé de majorités favorables dans les deux chambres du Congrès, contesté dans son propre parti, Bush aura-t-il la marge de manuvre, et, au fond, lesprit de décision et la sagesse stratégique voulus pour faire face à lIran ?
Ahmadinejad et ses séides sont convaincus de la grande faiblesse du « tigre de papier » américain. Le marasme irakien, léchec israélien au Liban, la situation politique aux Etats-Unis, le désarroi au sein de la coalition occidentale, le soutien inconditionnel de Chirac et de Poutine à toutes les turpitudes de lIran, ont parachevé le sentiment dimpunité qui isole encore plus le président iranien de la réalité : il se pense invincible. On peut prévoir une aggravation des attaques anti-américaines (et anti-israéliennes). En Afghanistan comme en Irak, lIran met la pression. Cest dans ce cadre quil commettra des erreurs stratégiques fatales, le genre derreur de calcul qui force la main des hésitants. Une provocation de plus, et Bush, qui nest jamais aussi bon que quand il est piqué au vif, repassera à laction au lieu de nêtre que passif-agressif. La région le soutiendra - elle le lui demande. Le jeu est jouable, à condition dêtre joué !
Jean Paul Baquiast
07/02/2007
Nous rappellerons que, concernant par exemple les dépenses consacrées par lEurope (principalement la France, lItalie et lAllemagne) au spatial militaire (satellites de télécoms et dobservation), le budget actuel est de 1 milliard deuros. Les experts souhaitent, sans trop despoir, quil puisse être porté à 2 mds en 2008. On pourra lire dans quelques temps sur le site des assemblées françaises le rapport Politique spatiale européenne, audace ou déclin, présenté ce jour 07/02/05 par l’Office parlementaire d’évaluation des choix scientifiques et technologiques, dont ce chiffre est extrait.
PHR
07/02/2007
Dominique de Villepin déclare au Financial Times que les Etats-Unis et leurs “alliés” devront avoir quitté la Mésopotamie avant un an. Objectif : être ministre des Affaires étrangères de Sarkozy.
AmnésieInternationale
07/02/2007
Le démenti fait très rapidement par le groupe Dassault Aviation de linformation publiée par lhebdomadaire le Journal du Dimanche concernant lachat par la Libye de 13 à 18 avions de combat du type Rafale, avait pour objectif danticiper sur une réaction négative qui pourrait intervenir de la part de Tripoli. Celle-ci aurait apparemment souhaité lors des négociations avec lavionneur français que cette transaction reste à lécart des médias jusquaprès les élections présidentielles prévues le 6 mai prochain. De source informée, la finalisation de la vente des rafales dépendrait même de la menée à terme dun contrat intermédiaire concernant la restauration dune vingtaine de mirages F1 lybiens. Tripoli en profite pour forcer la main de Paris afin que Dassault aviation équipe les avions « restaurés » de missiles air/air dernère génération réservés à lArmée de lair française : une surenchère difficile qui est loin dêtre réglée.
Dans ce contexte, il semble que le Guide de la révolution libyenne qui gère ce dossier avec son fils, Assaâdi et le général Rifi tous les deux avaient visité, il y a un peu plus de trois mois, les usines de Dassault en France , na aucunement lintention de donner ce cadeau a un président qui est sur le point de départ. Cest ce que répète ces jours-ci son chef de cabinet, Bachir Saleh. Cela ne veut pas dire, dautre part, que le régime libyen aurait, contrairement à certaines rumeurs, un penchant pour le candidat de lUMP, Nicolas Sarkozy, qui avait visité la Libye et rencontré le colonel Kadhafi. Parallèlement, la Quiada libyenne (le Haut commandement qui entoure le chef de lÉtat libyen), aurait des preuves sur la source qui est derrière linformation publiée par lhebdomadaire français. Il sagit du groupe Lagardère qui, selon Dassault Aviation, avait voulu, à tout prix, empêcher ce dernier de concrétiser lopération dachat avant les élections présidentielles.
Par ailleurs, force est de souligner que si les forces libyennes de lair sont convaincues des caractéristiques offertes par le Rafale, cela ne les empêchent pas de mener des négociations parallèles avec les Russes pour lacquisition de 20 Mig 29. Le récent rapprochement entre Moscou et Tripoli, qui sest concrétisé par loctroi, dans le cadre du troisième appel doffres pour lexploration et la production, aux deux compagnies pétrolières russes, Gazprom et Tafnet, quatre licences sur dix au détriment des européennes, y compris le groupe français. Total, montre que la bataille de Dassault est loin dêtre gagnée. Assaâdi lavait déjà fait entendre lors de son passage chez lavionneur français. « Si la décision finale me revenait, jaurais signé le contrat sur place ».
Stéphane
07/02/2007
If war breaks out, I’m sending the F-22, Keys told Aviation Week & Space Technology last week. But not for operations in Iraq or Afghanistan. I didn’t buy the F-22 for Iraq »
Il est intéressant de noter que dans lesprit de Mr Keys, lIrak et lAfghanistan sont des « opérations », à ne pas confondre avec des « guerres ».
Dautre part, on remarquera que même dans le cas de la « guerre normale », on attend de lennemi quil nutilise pas de contre mesures et autres moyens électroniques, qui vraisemblablement contrarient le statut davion-le-plus-avancé-du-monde du F-22.
Mr Keys devrait se méfier. Lennemi à souvent tendance à montrer un total manque de fair play.
Jackson
07/02/2007
The Jacksonian Tradition
by Walter Russell Mead
In the last five months of World War II, American bombing raids claimed the lives of more than 900,000 Japanese civiliansnot counting the casualties from the atomic strikes against Hiroshima and Nagasaki. This is more than twice the total number of combat deaths that the United States has suffered in all its foreign wars combined.
On one night, that of March 9-10, 1945, 234 Superfortresses dropped 1,167 tons of incendiary bombs over downtown Tokyo; 83,793 Japanese bodies were found in the charred remainsa number greater than the 80,942 combat fatalities that the United States sustained in the Korean and Vietnam Wars combined.
Since the Second World War, the United States has continued to employ devastating force against both civilian and military targets. Out of a pre-war population of 9.49 million, an estimated 1 million North Korean civilians are believed to have died as a result of U.S. actions during the 1950-53 conflict. During the same war, 33,870 American soldiers died in combat, meaning that U.S. forces killed approximately thirty North Korean civilians for every American soldier who died in action. The United States dropped almost three times as much explosive tonnage in the Vietnam War as was used in the Second World War, and something on the order of 365,000 Vietnamese civilians are believed to have been killed during the period of American involvement.
Regardless of Clausewitzs admonition that “casualty reports . . . are never accurate, seldom truthful, and in most cases deliberately falsified”, these numbers are too striking to ignore. They do not, of course, suggest a moral parallel between the behavior of, say, German and Japanese aggressors and American forces seeking to defeat those aggressors in the shortest possible time. German and Japanese forces used the indiscriminate murder of civilians as a routine police tool in occupied territory, and wholesale massacres of civilians often accompanied German and Japanese advances into new territory. The behavior of the German Einsatzgruppen and of the Japanese army during the Rape of Nanking has no significant parallel on the American side.
In the Cold War, too, the evils the Americans fought were far worse than those they inflicted. Tens of millions more innocent civilians in communist nations were murdered by their own governments in peacetime than ever died as the result of American attempts to halt communisms spread. War, even brutal war, was more merciful than communist rule.
Nevertheless, the American war record should make us think. An observer who thinks of American foreign policy only in terms of the commercial realism of the Hamiltonians, the crusading moralism of Wilsonian transcendentalists, and the supple pacifism of the principled but slippery Jeffersonians would be at a loss to account for American ruthlessness at war.
Those who prefer to believe that the present global hegemony of the United States emerged through a process of immaculate conception avert their eyes from many distressing moments in the American ascension. Yet students of American power cannot ignore one of the chief elements in American success. The United States over its history has consistently summoned the will and the means to compel its enemies to yield to its demands.
Through the long sweep of American history, there have been many occasions when public opinion, or at least an important part of it, got ahead of politicians in demanding war. Many of the Indian wars were caused less by Indian aggression than by movements of frontier populations willing to provoke and fight wars with Indian tribes that were nominally under Washingtons protectionand contrary both to the policy and the wishes of the national government. The War of 1812 came about largely because of a popular movement in the South and Midwest. Abraham Lincoln barely succeeded in preventing a war with Britain over the Trent Affair during the Civil War; public opinion made it difficult for him to find an acceptable, face-saving solution to the problem. More recently, John Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon were all haunted by fears that a pullout from the Vietnam War would trigger a popular backlash.
Once wars begin, a significant element of American public opinion supports waging them at the highest possible level of intensity. The devastating tactics of the wars against the Indians, General Shermans campaign of 1864-65, and the unprecedented aerial bombardments of World War II were all broadly popular in the United States. During both the Korean and Vietnam Wars, presidents came under intense pressure, not only from military leaders but also from public opinion, to hit the enemy with all available force in all available places. Throughout the Cold War the path of least resistance in American politics was generally the more hawkish stance. Politicians who advocated negotiated compromises with the Soviet enemy were labeled appeasers and paid a heavy political price. The Korean and Vietnam Wars lost public support in part because of political decisions not to risk the consequences of all-out war, not necessarily stopping short of the use of nuclear weapons. The most costly decision George Bush took in the Gulf War was not to send ground forces into Iraq, but to stop short of the occupation of Baghdad and the capture and trial of Saddam Hussein.
It is often remarked that the American people are more religious than their allies in Western Europe. But it is equally true that they are more military-minded. Currently, the American people support without complaint what is easily the highest military budget in the world. In 1998 the United States spent as much on defense as its NATO allies, South Korea, Japan, the Persian Gulf states, Russia and China combined. In response to widespread public concern about a decline in military preparedness, the Clinton administration and the Republican Congress are planning substantial increases in military spending in the years to come.
Americans do not merely pay for these forces, they use them. Since the end of the Vietnam War, taken by some as opening a new era of reluctance in the exercise of American power, the United States has deployed combat forces in, or used deadly force over, Cambodia, Iran, Grenada, Panama, Lebanon, Libya, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Iraq, Turkey, Somalia, Haiti, Bosnia, Sudan, Afghanistan, the South China Sea, Liberia, Macedonia, Albania and Yugoslavia. This is a record that no other country comes close to matching.
It is also generally conceded that, with the exception of a handful of elite units in such forces as the British Army, American troops have a stronger “warrior culture” than do the armies of other wealthy countries. Indeed, of all the nato countries other than Turkey and Greece, only Great Britain today has anything like the American “war lobby” that becomes active in times of national crisisa political force that under certain circumstances demands war, supports the decisive use of force, and urges political leaders to stop wasting time with negotiations, sanctions and Security Council meetings in order to attack the enemy with all possible strength.
Why is it that U.S. public opinion is often so quickthough sometimes so slowto support armed intervention abroad? What are the provocations that energize public opinion (at least some of it) for warand how, if at all, is this “war lobby” related to the other elements of that opinion? The key to this warlike disposition, and to other important features of American foreign policy, is to be found in what I shall call its Jacksonian tradition, in honor of the sixth president of the United States.
The School of Andrew Jackson
It is a tribute to the general historical amnesia about American politics between the War of 1812 and the Civil War that Andrew Jackson is not more widely counted among the greatest of American presidents. Victor in the Battle of New Orleansperhaps the most decisive battle in the shaping of the modern world between Trafalgar and StalingradAndrew Jackson laid the foundation of American politics for most of the nineteenth century, and his influence is still felt today. With the ever ready help of the brilliant Martin Van Buren, he took American politics from the era of silk stockings into the smoke-filled room. Every political party since his presidency has drawn on the symbolism, the institutions and the instruments of power that Jackson pioneered.
More than that, he brought the American people into the political arena. Restricted state franchises with high property qualifications meant that in 1820 many American states had higher property qualifications for voters than did boroughs for the British House of Commons. With Jacksons presidency, universal male suffrage became the basis of American politics and political values.
His political movementor, more accurately, the community of political feeling that he wielded into an instrument of powerremains in many ways the most important in American politics. Solidly Democratic through the Truman administration (a tradition commemorated in the annual Jefferson-Jackson Day dinners that are still the high points on Democratic Party calendars in many cities and states), Jacksonian America shifted toward the Republican Party under Richard Nixonthe most important political change in American life since the Second World War. The future of Jacksonian political allegiance will be one of the keys to the politics of the twenty-first century.
Suspicious of untrammeled federal power (Waco), skeptical about the prospects for domestic and foreign do-gooding (welfare at home, foreign aid abroad), opposed to federal taxes but obstinately fond of federal programs seen as primarily helping the middle class (Social Security and Medicare, mortgage interest subsidies), Jacksonians constitute a large political interest.
In some ways Jacksonians resemble the Jeffersonians, with whom their political fortunes were linked for so many decades. Like Jeffersonians, Jacksonians are profoundly suspicious of elites. They generally prefer a loose federal structure with as much power as possible retained by states and local governments. But the differences between the two movements run very deepso deep that during the Cold War they were on dead opposite sides of most important foreign policy questions. To use the language of the Vietnam era, a time when Jeffersonians and Jacksonians were fighting in the streets over foreign policy, the former were the most dovish current in mainstream political thought during the Cold War, while the latter were the most consistently hawkish.
One way to grasp the difference between the two schools is to see that both Jeffersonians and Jacksonians are civil libertarians, passionately attached to the Constitution and especially to the Bill of Rights, and deeply concerned to preserve the liberties of ordinary Americans. But while the Jeffersonians are most profoundly devoted to the First Amendment, protecting the freedom of speech and prohibiting a federal establishment of religion, Jacksonians see the Second Amendment, the right to bear arms, as the citadel of liberty. Jeffersonians join the American Civil Liberties Union; Jacksonians join the National Rifle Association. In so doing, both are convinced that they are standing at the barricades of freedom.
For foreigners and for some Americans, the Jacksonian tradition is the least impressive in American politics. It is the most deplored abroad, the most denounced at home. Jacksonian chairs of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee are the despair of high-minded people everywhere, as they hold up adhesion to the Kyoto Protocol, starve the UN and the IMF, cut foreign aid, and ban the use of U.S. funds for population control programs abroad. When spokesmen for other schools of thought speak about the “problems” of American foreign policy, the persistence and power of the Jacksonian school are high on their list. While some of this fashionable despair may be overdone, and is perhaps a reflection of different class interests and values, it is true that Jacksonians often figure as the most obstructionist of the schools, as the least likely to support Wilsonian initiatives for a better world, to understand Jeffersonian calls for patient diplomacy in difficult situations, or to accept Hamiltonian trade strategies. Yet without Jacksonians, the United States would be a much weaker power.
A principal explanation of why Jacksonian politics are so poorly understood is that Jacksonianism is less an intellectual or political movement than an expression of the social, cultural and religious values of a large portion of the American public. And it is doubly obscure because it happens to be rooted in one of the portions of the public least represented in the media and the professoriat. Jacksonian America is a folk community with a strong sense of common values and common destiny; though periodically led by intellectually brilliant menlike Andrew Jackson himselfit is neither an ideology nor a self-conscious movement with a clear historical direction or political table of organization. Nevertheless, Jacksonian America has producedand looks set to continue to produceone political leader and movement after another, and it is likely to continue to enjoy major influence over both foreign and domestic policy in the United States for the foreseeable future.
The Evolution of a Community
It is not fashionable today to think of the American nation as a folk community bound together by deep cultural and ethnic ties. Believers in a multicultural America attack this idea from one direction, but conservatives too have a tendency to talk about the United States as a nation based on ideology rather than ethnicity. Former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, among others, has said that the United States is unlike other nations because it is based on an idea rather than on a community of national experience. The continuing and growing vitality of the Jacksonian tradition is, for better or worse, living proof that she is at least partly wrong.
If Jeffersonianism is the book-ideology of the United States, Jacksonian populism is its folk-ideology. Historically, American populism has been based less on the ideas of the Enlightenment than on the community values and sense of identity among the British colonizers who first settled this country. In particular, as David Hackett Fischer has shown, Jacksonian populism can be originally identified with a subgroup among these settlers, the so-called “Scots-Irish”, who settled the back country regions of the Carolinas and Virginia, and who went on to settle much of the Old WestWest Virginia, Kentucky, parts of Indiana and Illinoisand the southern and south central states of Tennessee, Missouri, Alabama, Mississippi and Texas. Jacksonian populism today has moved beyond its original ethnic and geographical limits. Like country music, another product of Jacksonian culture, Jacksonian politics and folk feeling has become a basic element in American consciousness that can be found from one end of the country to the other.
The Scots-Irish were a hardy and warlike people, with a culture and outlook formed by centuries of bitter warfare before they came to the United States. Fischer shows how, trapped on the frontiers between England and Scotland, or planted as Protestant colonies in the hostile soil of Ireland, this culture was shaped through centuries of constant, bloody war. The Revolutionary struggle and generations of savage frontier conflict in the United States reproduced these conditions in the New World; the Civil Warfought with particular ferocity in the border statesrenewed the cultural heritage of war.
The role of what we are calling Jacksonian America in nineteenth-century America is clear, but many twentieth-century observers made what once seemed the reasonable assumption that Jacksonian values and politics were dying out. These observers were both surprised and discomfited when Ronald Reagans political success showed that Jacksonian America had done more than survive; it was, and is, thriving.
What has happened is that Jacksonian culture, values and self-identification have spread beyond their original ethnic limits. In the 1920s and 1930s the highland, border tradition in American life was widely thought to be dying out, ethnically, culturally and politically. Part of this was the economic and demographic collapse of the traditional home of Jacksonian America: the family farm. At the same time, mass immigration from southern and Eastern Europe tilted the ethnic balance of the American population ever farther from its colonial mix. New England Yankees were a vanishing species, limited to the hills of New Hampshire and Vermont, while the cities and plains of Connecticut, Massachusetts and Rhode Island filled with Irishmen, Italians, Portuguese and Greeks. The great cities of the United States were increasingly filled with Catholics, members of the Orthodox churches and Jewsall professing in one way or another communitarian social values very much at odds with the individualism of traditional Anglo-Saxon and Anglo-Celtic culture.
As Hiram W. Evans, the surprisingly articulate Imperial Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan, wrote in 1926, the old stock American of his time had become a stranger in large parts of the land his fathers gave him. Moreover, he is a most unwelcome stranger, one much spit upon, and one to whom even the right to have his own opinions and to work for his own interests is now denied with jeers and revilings. We must Americanize the Americans, a distinguished immigrant said recently.
Protestantism itself was losing its edge. The modernist critique of traditional Biblical readings found acceptance in one mainline denomination after another; Episcopal, Presbyterian, Methodist and Lutheran seminaries accepted critical, post-Darwinian readings of Scripture; self-described “fundamentalists” fought a slow, but apparently losing, rearguard action against the modernist forces. The new mainline Protestantism was a tolerant, even a namby-pamby, religion.
The old nativist spirit, anti-immigrant, anti-modern art and apparently anti-twentieth century, still had some biteKu Klux crosses flamed across the Midwest as well as the South during the 1920sbut it all looked like the death throes of an outdated idea. There werent many mourners: much of H.L. Menckens career was based on exposing the limitations and mocking the death of what we are calling Jacksonian America.
Most progressive, right thinking intellectuals in mid-century America believed that the future of American populism lay in a social democratic movement based on urban immigrants. Social activists like Woody Guthrie and Pete Seeger consciously sought to use cultural forms like folk songs to ease the transition from the old individualistic folk world to the collective new one that they believed was the wave of the future; they celebrated unions and other strange, European ideas in down home country twangs so that, in the bitter words of Hiram Evans, “There is a steady flood of alien ideas being spread over the country, always carefully disguised as American.”
What came next surprised almost everyone. The tables turned, and Evans Americans “americanized” the immigrants rather than the other way around. In what is still a largely unheralded triumph of the melting pot, Northern immigrants gradually assimilated the values of Jacksonian individualism. Each generation of new Americans was less “social” and more individualistic than the preceding one. American Catholics, once among the worlds most orthodox, remained Catholic in religious allegiance but were increasingly individualistic in terms of psychology and behavior (“I respect the Pope, but I have to follow my own conscience”). Ties to the countries of emigration steadily weakened, and the tendency to marry outside the group strengthened.
Outwardly, most immigrant groups completed an apparent assimilation to American material culture within a couple of generations of their arrival. A second type of assimilationan inward assimilation to and adaptation of the core cultural and psychological structure of the native populationtook longer, but as third, fourth and fifth-generation immigrant families were exposed to the economic and social realities of American life, they were increasingly “americanized” on the inside as well as without.
This immense and complex process was accelerated by social changes that took place after 1945. Physically, the old neighborhoods broke up, and the Northern industrial working class, along with the refugees from the dying American family farm, moved into the suburbs to form a new populist mix. As increasing numbers of the descendants of immigrants moved into the Jacksonian Sunbelt, the pace of assimilation grew. The suburban homeowner with his or her federally subsidized mortgage replaced the homesteading farmer (on free federal land) as the central pillar of American populism. Richard Nixon, with his two-pronged appeal to white Southerners and the “Joe Six-pack” voters of the North, was the first national politician to recognize the power of this newly energized current in American life.
Urban, immigrant America may have softened some of the rough edges of Jacksonian America, but the descendants of the great wave of European immigration sound more like Andrew Jackson from decade to decade. Rugged frontier individualism has proven to be contagious; each successive generation has been more Jacksonian than its predecessor. The social and economic solidarity rooted in European peasant communities has been overmastered by the individualism of the frontier. The descendants of European working-class Marxists now quote Adam Smith; Joe Six-pack thinks of the welfare state as an expensive burden, not part of the natural moral order. Intellectuals have made this transition as thoroughly as anyone else. The children and grandchildren of trade unionists and Trotskyites now talk about the importance of liberal society and free markets; in the intellectual pilgrimage of Irving Kristol, what is usually a multigenerational process has been compressed into a single, brilliant career.
The new Jacksonianism is no longer rural and exclusively nativist. Frontier Jacksonianism may have taken the homesteading farmer and the log cabin as its emblems, but todays Crabgrass Jacksonianism sees the homeowner on his modest suburban lawn as the hero of the American story. The Crabgrass Jacksonian may wear green on St. Patricks Day; he or she might go to a Catholic Church and never listen to country music (though, increasingly, he or she probably does); but the Crabgrass Jacksonian doesnt just believe, she knows that she is as good an American as anybody else, that she is entitled to her rights from Church and State, that she pulls her own weight and expects others to do the same. That homeowner will be heard from: Ronald Reagan owed much of his popularity and success to his ability to connect with Jacksonian values. Ross Perot and Pat Buchanan in different ways have managed to tap into the power of the populist energy that Old Hickory rode into the White House. In both domestic and foreign policy, the twenty-first century will be profoundly influenced by the values and concerns of Jacksonian America.
The Jacksonian Code
To understand how Crabgrass Jacksonianism is shaping and will continue to shape American foreign policy, we must begin with another unfashionable concept: Honor. Although few Americans today use this anachronistic word, honor remains a core value for tens of millions of middle-class Americans, women as well as men. The unacknowledged code of honor that shapes so much of American behavior and aspiration today is a recognizable descendent of the frontier codes of honor of early Jacksonian America. The appeal of this code is one of the reasons that Jacksonian values have spread to so many people outside the original ethnic and social nexus in which Jacksonian America was formed.
The first principle of this code is self-reliance. Real Americans, many Americans feel, are people who make their own way in the world. They may get a helping hand from friends and family, but they hold their places in the world through honest work. They dont slide by on welfare, and they dont rely on inherited wealth or connections. Those who wont work and are therefore poor, or those who dont need to work due to family money, are viewed with suspicion. Those who meet the economic and moral tests belong to the broad Middle Class, the folk community of working people that Jacksonians believe to be the heart, soul and spine of the American nation. Earning and keeping a place in this community on the basis of honest work is the first principle of Jacksonian honor, and it remains a serious insult even to imply that a member of the American middle class is not pulling his or her weight in the world.
Jacksonian honor must be acknowledged by the outside world. One is entitled to, and demands, the appropriate respect: recognition of rights and just claims, acknowledgment of ones personal dignity. Many Americans will still fight, sometimes with weapons, when they feel they have not been treated with the proper respect. But even among the less violent, Americans stand on their dignity and rights. Respect is also due age. Those who know Jacksonian America only through its very inexact representations in the media think of the United States as a youth-obsessed, age-neglecting society. In fact, Jacksonian America honors age. Andrew Jackson was sixty-one when he was elected president for the first time; Ronald Reagan was seventy. Most movie stars lose their appeal with age; those whose appeal stems from their ability to portray and embody Jacksonian valueslike John Wayneonly become more revered.
The second principle of the code is equality. Among those members of the folk community who do pull their weight, there is an absolute equality of dignity and right. No one has a right to tell the self-reliant Jacksonian what to say, do or think. Any infringement on equality will be met with defiance and resistance. Male or female, the Jacksonian is, and insists on remaining, independent of church, state, social hierarchy, political parties and labor unions. Jacksonians may choose to accept the authority of a leader or movement or faith, but will never yield to an imposed authority. The young are independent of the old: “free, white and twenty-one” is an old Jacksonian expression; the color line has softened, but otherwise the sentiment is as true as it ever was.
Mrs. Fanny Trollope (mother of novelist Anthony Trollope) had the misfortune to leave her native Britain to spend two years in the United States. Next to her revulsion at the twin American habits of chewing tobacco in public places and missing spittoons with the finished product, she most despised the passion for equality she found everywhere she looked. “The theory of equality”, Mrs. Trollope observed,
may be very daintily discussed by English gentlemen in a London dining-room, when the servant, having placed a fresh bottle of cool wine on the table, respectfully shuts the door, and leaves them to their walnuts and their wisdom; but it will be found less palatable when it presents itself in the shape of a hard, greasy paw, and is claimed in accents that breathe less of freedom than of onions and whiskey. Strong, indeed, must be the love of equality in an English breast if it can survive a tour through the Union.
The third principle is individualism. The Jacksonian does not just have the right to self-fulfillmenthe or she has a duty to seek it. In Jacksonian America, everyone must find his or her way: each individual must choose a faith, or no faith, and code of conduct based on conscience and reason. The Jacksonian feels perfectly free to strike off in an entirely new religious direction. “I sincerely believe”, wrote poor Mrs. Trollope, “that if a fire-worshiper, or an Indian Brahmin, were to come to the United States, prepared to preach and pray in English, he would not be long without a very respectable congregation.” She didnt know the half of it.
Despite this individualism, the Jacksonian code also mandates acceptance of certain social mores and principles. Loyalty to family, raising children “right”, sexual decency (heterosexual monogamywhich can be serial) and honesty within the community are virtues that commend themselves to the Jacksonian spirit. Children of both sexes can be wild, but both women and men must be strong. Corporal punishment is customary and common; Jacksonians find objections to this time-honored and (they feel) effective method of discipline outlandish and absurd. Although women should be more discreet, both sexes can sow wild oats before marriage. After it, to enjoy the esteem of their community a couple must be seen to put their childrens welfare ahead of personal gratification.
The fourth pillar in the Jacksonian honor code struck Mrs. Trollope and others as more dishonorable than honorable, yet it persists nevertheless. Let us call it financial esprit. While the Jacksonian believes in hard work, he or she also believes that credit is a right and that money, especially borrowed money, is less a sacred trust than a means for self-discovery and expression. Although previous generations lacked the faculties for consumer credit that Americans enjoy at the end of the twentieth century, many Americans have always assumed that they have a right to spend money on their appearance, on purchases that affirm their status. The strict Jacksonian code of honor does not enjoin what others see as financial probity. What it demands, rather, is a daring and entrepreneurial spirit. Credit is seen less as an obligation than as an opportunity. Jacksonians have always supported loose monetary policy and looser bankruptcy laws.
Finally, courage is the crowning and indispensable part of the code. Jacksonians must be ready to defend their honor in great things and small. Americans ought to stick up for what they believe. In the nineteenth century, Jacksonian Americans fought duels long after aristocrats in Europe had given them up, and Americans today remain far more likely than Europeans to settle personal quarrels with extreme and even deadly violence.
Jacksonian Americas love affair with weapons is, of course, the despair of the rest of the country. Jacksonian culture values firearms, and the freedom to own and use them. The right to bear arms is a mark of civic and social equality, and knowing how to care for firearms is an important part of life. Jacksonians are armed for defense: of the home and person against robbers; against usurpations of the federal government; and of the United States against its enemies. In one war after another, Jacksonians have flocked to the colors. Independent and difficult to discipline, they have nevertheless demonstrated magnificent fighting qualities in every corner of the world. Jacksonian America views military service as a sacred duty. When Hamiltonians, Wilsonians and Jeffersonians dodged the draft in Vietnam or purchased exemptions and substitutes in earlier wars, Jacksonians soldiered on, if sometimes bitterly and resentfully. An honorable person is ready to kill or to die for family and flag.
Jacksonian society draws an important distinction between those who belong to the folk community and those who do not. Within that community, among those bound by the code and capable of discharging their responsibilities under it, Jacksonians are united in a social compact. Outside that compact is chaos and darkness. The criminal who commits what, in the Jacksonian code, constitute unforgivable sins (cold-blooded murder, rape, the murder or sexual abuse of a child, murder or attempted murder of a peace officer) can justly be killed by the victims families, colleagues or by society at largewith or without the formalities of law. In many parts of the United States, juries will not convict police on almost any charge, nor will they condemn revenge killers in particularly outrageous cases. The right of the citizen to defend family and property with deadly force is a sacred one as well, a legacy from colonial and frontier times.
The absolute and even brutal distinction drawn between the members of the community and outsiders has had massive implications in American life. Throughout most of American history the Jacksonian community was one from which many Americans were automatically and absolutely excluded: Indians, Mexicans, Asians, African Americans, obvious sexual deviants and recent immigrants of non-Protestant heritage have all felt the sting. Historically, the law has been helpless to protect such people against economic oppression, social discrimination and mob violence, including widespread lynchings. Legislators would not enact laws, and if they did, sheriffs would not arrest, prosecutors would not try, juries would not convict.
This tells us something very important: throughout most of American history and to a large extent even today, equal rights emerge from and depend on this popular culture of equality and honor rather than flow out of abstract principles or written documents. The many social and legal disabilities still suffered in practice by unpopular minorities demonstrate that the courts and the statute books still enjoy only a limited ability to protect equal rights in the teeth of popular feeling and culture.
Even so, Jacksonian values play a major role in African-American culture. If anything, that role has increased with the expanded presence of African Americans in all military ranks. The often blighted social landscape of the inner city has in some cases re-created the atmosphere and practices of American frontier life. In many ways the gang culture of some inner cities resembles the social atmosphere of the Jacksonian South, as well as the hard drinking, womanizing, violent male culture of the Mississippi in the days of Davy Crockett and Mark Twain. Bragging about ones physical and sexual prowess, the willingness to avenge disrespect with deadly force, a touchy insistence that one is as good as anybody else: once over his shock at the urban landscape and the racial issue, Billy the Kid would find himself surprisingly at home in such an environment.
The degree to which African-American society resembles Jacksonian culture remains one of the crucial and largely overlooked elements in American life. Despite historical experiences that would have completely alienated many ethnic minorities around the world, American black popular culture remains profoundlyand, in times of danger, fiercelypatriotic. From the Revolution onward, African Americans have sought more to participate in Americas wars than to abstain from them, and the strength of personal and military honor codes in African-American culture today remains a critical factor in assuring the continued strength of American military forces into the twenty-first century.
The underlying cultural unity between African Americans and Anglo-Jacksonian America shaped the course and ensured the success of the modern civil rights movement. Martin Luther King and his followers exhibited exemplary personal courage, their rhetoric was deeply rooted in Protestant Christianity, and the rights they asked for were precisely those that Jacksonian America values most for itself. Further, they scrupulously avoided the violent tactics that would have triggered an unstoppable Jacksonian response.
Although cultures change slowly and many individuals lag behind, the bulk of American Jacksonian opinion has increasingly moved to recognize the right of code-honoring members of minority groups to receive the rights and protections due to members of the folk community. This new and, one hopes, growing feeling of respect and tolerance emphatically does not extend to those, minorities or not, who are not seen as code-honoring Americans. Those who violate or reject the codecriminals, irresponsible parents, drug addictshave not benefited from the softening of the Jacksonian color line.
Instinct, Not Ideology
Those who like to cast American foreign policy as an unhealthy mix of ignorance, isolationism and trigger-happy cowboy diplomacy are often thinking about the Jacksonian populist tradition. That tradition is stronger among the mass of ordinary people than it is among the elite. It is more strongly entrenched in the heartland than on either of the two coasts. It has been historically associated with white Protestant males of the lower and middle classestoday the least fashionable element in the American political mix.
Although there are many learned and thoughtful Jacksonians, including those who have made distinguished careers in public service, it is certainly true that the Jacksonian philosophy is embraced by many people who know very little about the wider world. With them it is an instinct rather than an ideologya culturally shaped set of beliefs and emotions rather than a set of ideas. But ideas and policy proposals that resonate with Jacksonian core values and instincts enjoy wide support and can usually find influential supporters in the policy process.
So influential is Jacksonian opinion in the formation of American foreign policy that anyone lacking a feel for it will find much of American foreign policy baffling and opaque. Foreigners in particular have alternately overestimated and underestimated American determination because they failed to grasp the structure of Jacksonian opinion and influence. Yet Jacksonian views on foreign affairs are relatively straightforward, and once they are understood, American foreign policy becomes much less mysterious.
To begin with, although the other schools often congratulate themselves on their superior sophistication and appreciation for complexity, Jacksonianism provides the basis in American life for what many scholars and practitioners would consider the most sophisticated of all approaches to foreign affairs: realism. In this it stands with Jeffersonianism, while being deeply suspicious of the “global meliorist” elements found, in different forms, in both Wilsonian and Hamiltonian foreign policy ideas. Often, Jeffersonians and Jacksonians will stand together in opposition to humanitarian interventions, or interventions made in support of Wilsonian or Hamiltonian world order initiatives. However, while Jeffersonians espouse a minimalist realism under which the United States seeks to define its interests as narrowly as possible and to defend those interests with an absolute minimum of force, Jacksonians approach foreign policy in a very different spiritone in which honor, concern for reputation, and faith in military institutions play a much greater role.
Jacksonian realism is based on the very sharp distinction in popular feeling between the inside of the folk community and the dark world without. Jacksonian patriotism is not a doctrine but an emotion, like love of ones family. The nation is an extension of the family. Members of the American folk are bound together by history, culture and a common morality. At a very basic level, a feeling of kinship exists among Americans: we have one set of rules for dealing with each other and a very different set for the outside world. Unlike Wilsonians, who hope ultimately to convert the Hobbesian world of international relations into a Lockean political community, Jacksonians believe that it is natural and inevitable that national politics and national life will work on different principles from international affairs. For Jacksonians, the world community Wilsonians want to build is not merely a moral impossibility but a monstrosity. An American foreign policy that, for example, takes tax money from middle-class Americans to give to a corrupt and incompetent dictatorship overseas is nonsense; it hurts Americans and does little for Borrioboola-Gha. Countries, like families, should take care of their own; if everybody did that we would all be better off. Charity, meanwhile, should be left to private initiatives and private funds; Jacksonian America is not ungenerous but it lacks all confidence in the governments ability to administer charity, either at home or abroad.
Given the moral gap between the folk community and the rest of the worldand given that other countries are believed to have patriotic and communal feelings of their own, feelings that similarly harden once the boundary of the folk community is reachedJacksonians believe that international life is and will remain both anarchic and violent. The United States must be vigilant and strongly armed. Our diplomacy must be cunning, forceful and no more scrupulous than anybody elses. At times, we must fight pre-emptive wars. There is absolutely nothing wrong with subverting foreign governments or assassinating foreign leaders whose bad intentions are clear. Thus, Jacksonians are more likely to tax political leaders with a failure to employ vigorous measures than to worry about the niceties of international law.
Indeed, of all the major currents in American society, Jacksonians have the least regard for international law and international institutions. They prefer the rule of custom to the written law, and that is as true in the international sphere as it is in personal relations at home. Jacksonians believe that there is an honor code in international lifeas there was in clan warfare in the borderlands of Englandand those who live by the code will be treated under it. But those who violate the codewho commit terrorist acts in peacetime, for exampleforfeit its protection and deserve no consideration.
Many students of American foreign policy, both here and abroad, dismiss Jacksonians as ignorant isolationists and vulgar patriots, but, again, the reality is more complex, and their approach to the world and to war is more closely grounded in classical realism than many recognize. Jacksonians do not believe that the United States must have an unambiguously moral reason for fighting. In fact, they tend to separate the issues of morality and war more clearly than many members of the foreign policy establishment.
The Gulf War was a popular war in Jacksonian circles because the defense of the nations oil supply struck a chord with Jacksonian opinion. That opinionwhich has not forgotten the oil shortages and price hikes of the 1970sclearly considers stability of the oil supply a vital national interest and is prepared to fight to defend it. The atrocity propaganda about alleged Iraqi barbarisms in Kuwait did not inspire Jacksonians to war, and neither did legalistic arguments about U.S. obligations under the UN Charter to defend a member state from aggression. Those are useful arguments to screw Wilsonian courage to the sticking place, but they mean little for Jacksonians. Had there been no UN Charter and had Kuwait been even more corrupt and repressive that it is, Jacksonian opinion would still have supported the Gulf War. It would have supported a full-scale war with Iran over the 1980 hostage crisis, and it will take an equally hawkish stance toward any future threat to perceived U.S. interests in the Persian Gulf region.
In the absence of a clearly defined threat to the national interest, Jacksonian opinion is much less aggressive. It has not, for example, been enthusiastic about the U.S. intervention in the case of Bosnia. There the evidence of unspeakable atrocities was much greater than in Kuwait, and the legal case for intervention was as strong. Yet Jacksonian opinion saw no threat to the interests, as it understood them, of the United States, and Wilsonians were the only segment of the population that was actively eager for war.
In World War I it took the Zimmermann Telegram and the repeated sinking of American ships to convince Jacksonian opinion that war was necessary. In World War II, neither the Rape of Nanking nor the atrocities of Nazi rule in Europe drew the United States into the war. The attack on Pearl Harbor did.
To engage Jacksonians in support of the Cold War it was necessary to convince them that Moscow was engaged in a far-reaching and systematic campaign for world domination, and that this campaign would succeed unless the United States engaged in a long-term defensive effort with the help of allies around the world. That involved a certain overstatement of both Soviet intentions and capabilities, but that is beside the present point. Once Jacksonian opinion was convinced that the Soviet threat was real and that the Cold War was necessary, it stayed convinced. Populist American opinion accepted the burdens it imposed and worried only that the government would fail to prosecute the Cold War with the necessary vigor. No one should mistake the importance of this strong and constant support. Despite the frequent complaints by commentators and policymakers that the American people are “isolationist” and “uninterested in foreign affairs”, they have made and will make enormous financial and personal sacrifices if convinced that these are in the nations vital interests.
This mass popular patriotism, and the martial spirit behind it, gives the United States immense advantages in international affairs. After two world wars, no European nation has shown the same willingness to pay the price in blood and treasure for a global presence. Most of the “developed” nations find it difficult to maintain large, high-quality fighting forces. Not all of the martial patriotism in the United States comes out of the world of Jacksonian populism, but without that tradition, the United States would be hard pressed to maintain the kind of international military presence it now has.
Pessimism
While in many respects Jacksonian Americans have an optimistic outlook, there is a large and important sense in which they are pessimistic. Whatever the theological views of individual Jacksonians may be, Jacksonian culture believes in Original Sin and does not accept the Enlightenments belief in the perfectibility of human nature. As a corollary, Jacksonians are pre-millennialist: they do not believe that utopia is just around the corner. In fact, they tend to believe the reversethe anti-Christ will get here before Jesus does, and human history will end in catastrophe and flames, followed by the Day of Judgment.
This is no idle theological concept. Belief in the approach of the “End Times” and the “Great Tribulation”concepts rooted in certain interpretations of Jewish and Christian prophetic textshas been a powerful force in American life from colonial times. Jacksonians believe that neither Wilsonians nor Hamiltonians nor anybody else will ever succeed in building a peaceful world order, and that the only world order we are likely to get will be a bad one. No matter how much money we ship overseas, and no matter how cleverly the development bureaucrats spend it, it will not create peace on earth. Plans for universal disarmament and world courts of justice founder on the same rock of historical skepticism. Jacksonians just tend not to believe that any of these things will do much good.
In fact, they think they may do harm. Linked to the skepticism about man-made imitations of the Kingdom of God is a deep apprehension about the rise of an evil world order. In theological terms, this is a reference to the fear of the anti-Christ, who, many commentators affirm, is predicted in Scripture to come with the appearance of an angel of lighta charismatic political figure who offers what looks like a plan for world peace and order, but which is actually a Satanic snare intended to deceive.
For most of its history, Jacksonian America believed that the Roman Catholic Church was the chief emissary of Satan on earth, a belief that had accompanied the first Americans on their journey from Britain. Fear of Catholicism gradually subsided, but during the Cold War the Kremlin replaced the Vatican as the center for American popular fears about the forces of evil in the world. The international communist conspiracy captured the old stock American popular imagination because it fit cultural templates established in the days of the Long Parliament and the English Civil War. Descendants of immigrants from Eastern Europe had their own cultural dispositions toward conspiracy thinking, plus, in many cases, a deep hatred and fear of Russia.
The fear of a ruthless, formidable enemy abroad who enjoys a powerful fifth column in the United Statesincluding high-ranking officials who serve it either for greed or out of misguided ideological zealis older than the Republic. During the Cold War, this “paranoid tradition” in American life stayed mostly focused on the Kremlinthough organizations like the John Birch Society saw ominous links between the Kremlin and the American Establishment. The paranoid streak was, if anything, helpful in sustaining popular support for Cold War strategy. After the Cold War, it is proving more difficult to integrate into effective American policy. To some degree, the chief object of popular concern in post-Cold War America is the Hamiltonian dream of a fully integrated global economy, combined with the Wilsonian dream of global political order that ends the nightmare of warring nation-states. George Bushs call for a “New World Order” had a distinctly Orwellian connotation to the Jacksonian ear. Christian Coalition founder Pat Robertson, in his book The New World Order (1991), traces the call for that Order to a Satanic conspiracy consciously implemented by the pillars of the American Establishment.
The fear that the Establishment, linked to its counterpart in Britain and, through Britain, to all the corrupt movements and elites of the Old World, is relentlessly plotting to destroy American liberty is an old but still potent one. The Trilateral Commission, the Council on Foreign Relations, the Bilderbergers, the Bavarian Illuminati, the Rothschilds, the Rockefellers: these names and others echo through a large and shadowy world of conspiracy theories and class resentment. Should seriously bad economic times come, there is always the potential that, with effective leadership, the paranoid element in the Jacksonian world could ride popular anger and panic into power.
Honor
Another aspect of Jacksonian foreign policy is the aforementioned deep sense of national honor and a corresponding need to live up toin actuality and in the eyes of othersthe demands of an honor code. The political importance of this code should not be underestimated; Americans are capable of going to war over issues of national honor. The War of 1812 is an example of Jacksonian sentiment forcing a war out of resentment over continual national humiliations at the hand of Britain. (Those who suffered directly from British interference with American shipping, the merchants, were totally against the war.) At the end of the twentieth century, it is national honor, more than any vital strategic interest, that would require the United States to fulfill its promises to protect Taiwan from invasion.
The perception of national honor as a vital interest has always been a wedge issue driving Jacksonians and Jeffersonians apart. The Jeffersonian peace policy in the Napoleonic Wars became impossible as the War Hawks grew stronger. The same pattern recurred in the Carter administration, during which gathering Jacksonian fury and impatience at Carters Jeffersonian approaches to the Soviet Union, Panama, Iran and Nicaragua ignited a reaction that forced the President to reverse his basic policy orientation and ended by driving him from office. What Jeffersonian diplomacy welcomes as measures to head off war often look to Jacksonians like pusillanimous weakness.
Once the United States extends a security guarantee or makes a promise, we are required to honor that promise come what may. Jacksonian opinion, which in the nature of things had little faith that South Vietnam could build democracy or that there was anything concrete there of interest to the average American, was steadfast in support of the warthough not of the strategybecause we had given our word to defend South Vietnam. During this years war in Kosovo, Jacksonian opinion was resolutely against it to begin with. However, once U.S. honor was engaged, Jacksonians began to urge a stronger warfighting strategy including the use of ground troops. It is a bad thing to fight an unnecessary war, but it is inexcusable and dishonorable to lose one once it has begun.
Reputation is as important in international life as it is to the individual honor of Jacksonians. Honor in the Jacksonian imagination is not simply what one feels oneself to be on the inside; it is also a question of the respect and dignity one commands in the world at large. Jacksonian opinion is sympathetic to the idea that our reputationwhether for fair dealing or cheating, toughness or weaknesswill shape the way that others treat us. Therefore, at stake in a given crisis is not simply whether we satisfy our own ideas of what is due our honor. Our behavior and the resolution that we obtain must enhance our reputationour prestigein the world at large.
Warfighting
Jacksonian America has clear ideas about how wars should be fought, how enemies should be treated, and what should happen when the wars are over. It recognizes two kinds of enemies and two kinds of fighting: honorable enemies fight a clean fight and are entitled to be opposed in the same way; dishonorable enemies fight dirty wars and in that case all rules are off.
An honorable enemy is one who declares war before beginning combat; fights according to recognized rules of war, honoring such traditions as the flag of truce; treats civilians in occupied territory with due consideration; anda crucial pointrefrains from the mistreatment of prisoners of war. Those who surrender should be treated with generosity. Adversaries who honor the code will benefit from its protections, while those who want a dirty fight will get one.
This pattern was very clearly illustrated in the Civil War. The Army of the Potomac and the Army of Northern Virginia faced one another throughout the war, and fought some of the bloodiest battles of the nineteenth century, including long bouts of trench warfare. Yet Robert E. Lee and his men were permitted an honorable surrender and returned unmolested to their homes with their horses and personal side arms. One Confederate, however, was executed after the war: Captain Henry Wirz, who was convicted of mistreating Union prisoners of war at Camp Sumter, Georgia.
Although American Indians often won respect for their extraordinary personal courage, Jacksonian opinion generally considered Indians to be dishonorable opponents. American-Indian warrior codes (also honor based) permitted surprise attacks on civilians and the torture of prisoners of war. This was all part of a complex system of limited warfare among the tribal nations, but Jacksonian frontier dwellers were not students of multicultural diversity. In their view, Indian war tactics were the sign of a dishonorable, unscrupulous and cowardly form of war. Anger at such tactics led Jacksonians to abandon the restraints imposed by their own war codes, and the ugly skirmishes along the frontier spiraled into a series of genocidal conflicts in which each side felt the other was violating every standard of humane conduct.
The Japanese, another people with a highly developed war code based on personal honor, had the misfortune to create the same kind of impression on American Jacksonians. The sneak attack on Pearl Harbor, the gross mistreatment of American pows (the Bataan Death March), and Japanese fighting tactics all served to enrage American Jacksonians and led them to see the Pacific enemy as ruthless, dishonorable and inhuman. All contributed to the vitriolic intensity of combat in the Pacific theater. By the summer of 1945, American popular opinion was fully prepared to countenance invasion of the Japanese home islands, even if they were defended with the tenacity (and indifference to civilian lives) that marked the fighting on Okinawa.
Given this background, the Americans who decided to use the atomic bomb may have been correct that the use of the weapon saved lives, and not only of American soldiers. In any case, Jacksonians had no compunction about using the bomb. General Curtis LeMay (subsequently the 1968 running mate of Jacksonian populist third-party candidate George Wallace) succinctly summed up this attitude toward fighting a dishonorable opponent: “Ill tell you what war is about”, said Lemay in an interview, “Youve got to kill people, and when youve killed enough they stop fighting.”
By contrast, although the Germans committed bestial crimes against civilians and pows (especially Soviet pows), their behavior toward the armed forces of the United States was more in accordance with American ideas about military honor. Indeed, General Erwin Rommel is considered something of a military hero among American Jacksonians: an honorable enemy. Still, if the Germans avoided exposure to the utmost fury of an aroused American people at war, they were nevertheless subjected to the full, ferocious scope of the violence that a fully aroused American public opinion will sustainand even insist upon.
For the first Jacksonian rule of war is that wars must be fought with all available force. The use of limited force is deeply repugnant. Jacksonians see war as a switch that is either “on” or “off.” They do not like the idea of violence on a dimmer switch. Either the stakes are important enough to fight forin which case you should fight with everything you haveor they are not, in which case you should mind your own business and stay home. To engage in a limited war is one of the costliest political decisions an American president can makeneither Truman nor Johnson survived it.
The second key concept in Jacksonian thought about war is that the strategic and tactical objective of American forces is to impose our will on the enemy with as few American casualties as possible. The Jacksonian code of military honor does not turn war into sport. It is a deadly and earnest business. This is not the chivalry of a medieval joust, or of the orderly battlefields of eighteenth-century Europe. One does not take risks with soldiers lives to give a “fair fight.” Some sectors of opinion in the United States and abroad were both shocked and appalled during the Gulf and Kosovo wars over the way in which American forces attacked the enemy from the air without engaging in much ground combat. The “turkey shoot” quality of the closing moments of the war against Iraq created a particularly painful impression. Jacksonians dismiss such thoughts out of hand. It is the obvious duty of American leaders to crush the forces arrayed against us as quickly, thoroughly and professionally as possible.
Jacksonian opinion takes a broad view of the permissible targets in war. Again reflecting a very old cultural heritage, Jacksonians believe that the enemys will to fight is a legitimate target of war, even if this involves American forces in attacks on civilian lives, establishments and property. The colonial wars, the Revolution and the Indian wars all give ample evidence of this view, and General William Tecumseh Shermans March to the Sea showed the degree to which the targeting of civilian morale through systematic violence and destruction could, to widespread popular applause, become an acknowledged warfighting strategy, even when fighting ones own rebellious kindred.
Probably as a result of frontier warfare, Jacksonian opinion came to believe that it was breaking the spirit of the enemy nation, rather than the fighting power of the enemys armies, that was the chief object of warfare. It was not enough to defeat a tribe in battle; one had to “pacify” the tribe, to convince it utterly that resistance was and always would be futile and destructive. For this to happen, the war had to go to the enemys home. The villages had to be burned, food supplies destroyed, civilians had to be killed. From the tiniest child to the most revered of the elderly sages, everyone in the enemy nation had to understand that further armed resistance to the will of the American peoplewhatever that might bewas simply not an option.
With the development of air power and, later, of nuclear weapons, this long-standing cultural acceptance of civilian targeting assumed new importance. Wilsonians and Jeffersonians protested even at the time against the deliberate terror bombing of civilian targets in the Second World War. Since 1945 there has been much agonized review of the American decision to use atomic bombs against Hiroshima and Nagasaki. None of this hand wringing has made the slightest impression on the Jacksonian view that the bombings were self-evidently justified and right. During both the Vietnam and Korean conflicts, there were serious proposals in Jacksonian quarters to use nuclear weaponswhy else have them? The only reason Jacksonian opinion has ever accepted not to use nuclear weapons is the prospect of retaliation.
Jacksonians also have strong ideas about how wars should end. “There is no substitute for victory”, as General MacArthur said, and the only sure sign of victory is the “unconditional surrender” of enemy forces. Just as Jacksonian opinion resents limits on American weapons and tactics, it also resents stopping short of victory. Unconditional surrender is not always a literal and absolute demand. The Confederate surrenders in 1865 included generous provisions for the losing armies. The Japanese were assured after the Potsdam Declaration that, while the United States insisted on unconditional surrender and acceptance of the terms, they could keep the “emperor system” after the war. However, there is only so much give in the idea: all resistance must cease; U.S. forces must make an unopposed entry into and occupation of the surrendering country; the political objectives of the war must be conceded in toto.
When in the later stages of World War II the Joint Chiefs of Staff discussed the prospect of an invasion of Kyushu, the southernmost of the major Japanese home islands, Admiral William Leahy projected 268,000 Americans would be killed or wounded out of an invasion force of 766,000. The invasion of the chief island of Honshu, tentatively planned for the spring of 1946, would have been significantly worse. While projected casualty figures like these led a number of American officials to argue for modification of the unconditional surrender formula, Secretary of State James M. Byrnes told Truman that he would be “crucified” if he retreated from this formulaone that received a standing ovation when Truman repeated it to Congress in his first address as president. Truman agreedwisely. His efforts to wage limited war in Korea cost him re-election in 1952. Similarly, Lyndon Johnsons inability to fight unlimited war for unconditional surrender in Vietnam cost him the presidency in 1968; Jimmy Carters inability to resolve the Iranian hostage crisis with a clear-cut victory destroyed any hope he had of winning the 1980 election; and George Bushs refusal to insist on an unconditional surrender in Iraq may have contributed to his defeat in the 1992 presidential election. For American presidents, MacArthur is right: there is no substitute for victory.
In Victory, Magnanimity
Once the enemy has made an unconditional surrender, the honor code demands that he be treated magnanimously. Grant fed Lees men from his army supplies, while Shermans initial agreement with General Johnston was so generous that it was overruled in Washington. American occupation troops in both Germany and Japan very quickly lost their rancor against the defeated foes. Not always disinterestedly, GIs in Europe were passing out chocolate bars, cigarettes and nylon stockings before the guns fell silent. The bitter racial antagonism that colored the Pacific War rapidly faded after it. Neither in Japan nor in Germany did American occupiers behave like the Soviet occupation forces in eastern Germany, where looting, rape and murder were still widespread months after the surrender.
In both Germany and Japan, the United States had originally envisioned a harsh occupation strategy with masses of war crimes trials and strict economic controlssomewhat akin to the original Radical Republican program in the post-Civil War South. But in all three cases, the victorious Americans quickly lost the appetite for vengeance against all but the most egregious offenders against the code. Whatever was said in the heat of battle, even the most Radical Reconstructionists envisioned the Souths ultimate return to its old political status and righ
Lambrechts Francis
07/02/2007
L’achat de sous marins allemands à capacités nucléaires (Dolfins avec “silos d’ogives”) n’apporte t’il pas une indication : Israël a déjà intégré l’existence d’un Iran nucléaire (parmis d’autres) et adapte sa disuassion. Si je comprends bien Israël devrait “l’activer” en la “dévoilant” au moment planifié et opportun ? (Olmert l’a déjà suggéré). Israël ne me semble pas la priorité de l’Iran, mais cet épouvantail médiatique est trop intéressant politiquement ?
La nucléarisation de l’Iran semble d’abord une protection “existentielle” contre les super-nucléaires (US et Russie, les deux ont envahis récemment les voisins Irakiens et Afghans).
Ensuite une protection contre les puissances régionales : Saddam a annexé la “pompe K8”, attaqué l’Iran ... on serait méfiant à moins ! Surtout avec l’explosion de la valeur de son pactole d’or noir excitant l’avidité de puissances nucléaires “émergées”, voisines, peu stables et assoiffées d’énergie. Le Pakistan est il un voisin rassurant ? A défaut d’un Texan ...
La menace iranienne s’adresse “finalement”, sinon historiquement, aux “dictatures théocratiques” compétitrices. C’est là aussi que la prolifération peut jaillir avec l’or noir. On peut établir une équation pétrole/nucléaire Saoudo-Pakistanaise, si elle n’est pas déjà résolue ? Equation sous forme de matrice en incluant l’Inde, l’Iran, la Chine (en écartant la Corée vu son voisin et ses besoins énergétiques relativement limités)
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