\t25 mai 2003 La question essentielle de la corruption des g\u00e9n\u00e9raux irakiens, confirm\u00e9e par un article de Defense News dont nous avons fait une pr\u00e9sentation le 20 mai,<\/a> commence \u00e0 appara\u00eetre dans le domaine public, au travers de divers articles reprenant l’information. Nous avons signal\u00e9 hier un article de The Independent<\/a> signalant l’article et d\u00e9veloppant ses r\u00e9v\u00e9lations.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n \tDepuis, un autre article est venu \u00e0 notre connaissance, publi\u00e9 auparavant sur le site Slate<\/em>, sous la plume de Robert Kaplan, chroniqueur militaire du site. L’article, sous le titre \u00ab Smart Bribes Centcom’s real secret weapon<\/em> \u00bb, a \u00e9t\u00e9 mis en ligne le m\u00eame jour que nous publiions notre commentaire, le 20 mai<\/a>. Voici, ci-dessous, la partie de l’article directement li\u00e9e aux r\u00e9v\u00e9lations de Defense News<\/em> :<\/p>\n<\/p>\n \t\u00ab A fascinating piece in the May 19 Defense News quotes Gen. Tommy Franks, chief of U.S. Central Command, confirming what had until now been mere rumors picked up by dubious Arab media outletsthat, before Gulf War II began, U.S. special forces had gone in and bribed Iraqi generals not to fight. I had letters from Iraqi generals saying, I now work for you,’ Franks told Defense News reporter Vago Muradian in a May 10 interview.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/p>\n \t\u00bb The article quotes a senior official as adding, What is the effect you want? How much does a cruise missile cost? Between one and 2.5 million dollars. Well, a bribe is a PGM [precision-guided munition] it achieves the aim, but it’s bloodless and there’s zero collateral damage.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/p>\n \t\u00bb One official is quoted as saying that, in the scheme of the whole military operation, the bribery was just icing on the cake. But another says that it was as important as the shooting part, maybe more important. We knew that some units would fight out of a sense of duty and patriotism, and they did. But it didn’t change the outcome because we knew how many of these [Iraqi generals] were going to call in sick.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/p>\n \t\u00bb All of which further reinforces the vague sense thatfor all the embeds, armchair generals, and round-the-clock news coveragewe still know startlingly little about what really happened in this war.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/p>\n \t\u00bb The Defense News article raises what could be the biggest military question of all: Just what won this war so swiftly the high-tech prowess and agility of the modern American military, or old-fashioned back-alley spycraft? Which was the real wonder weapon the smart bomb or the greenback?<\/em><\/p>\n<\/p>\n \t\u00bb I suspect a bit of both. But before we rush ahead and restructure the entire U.S. military on the basis of the lessons from the war, it might be good to find out for sure just what those lessons were.<\/em> \u00bb<\/p>\n<\/p>\n \tL’int\u00e9r\u00eat de l’article de Kaplan est qu’il soul\u00e8ve la question que nous avions nous-m\u00eames \u00e9voqu\u00e9e : que valent les prouesses militaires salu\u00e9es \u00e0 l’occasion de cette guerre s’il s’av\u00e8re que les adversaires des Anglo-Am\u00e9ricains avaient \u00e9t\u00e9 neutralis\u00e9s par la corruption, impliquant l’absence de r\u00e9elle d\u00e9fense organis\u00e9e ? L’article de The Independent<\/em> ne s’attarde pas \u00e0 cette sorte de sp\u00e9culations, se contentant de citer un sp\u00e9cialiste interrog\u00e9 pour l’occasion, qui, lui-m\u00eame, ne fait qu’esquisser le d\u00e9bat : \u00ab John Pike, director of the Washington-based military research group, GlobalSecurity.Org, said: It certainly strikes me that this is part of the mix. I don’t think there is any way of discerning how big a part of the mix it is … but it is part of the long queue of very interesting questions for which we do not yet have definitive answers.<\/em> \u00bb<\/p>\n<\/p>\n \tLes diverses inconnues qui ont marqu\u00e9 cette guerre, notamment celles qui sont d\u00e9sormais \u00e9lucid\u00e9es, l’absence d’armes de destruction massive et la corruption de l’arm\u00e9e irakienne font surtout s’interroger sur la n\u00e9cessit\u00e9 de l’\u00e9norme d\u00e9monstration de force qui l’a caract\u00e9ris\u00e9e, et dont on commence \u00e0 avancer qu’elle pourrait avoir fait plus de 10.000 tu\u00e9s civils irakiens<\/a>, en plus des d\u00e9g\u00e2ts innombrables caus\u00e9s, du chaos install\u00e9 comme on le voit aujourd’hui, de la l\u00e9galit\u00e9 internationale taill\u00e9e en pi\u00e8ces. On h\u00e9site avec une prudence compr\u00e9hensible sur les qualificatifs que pourraient choisir les historiens pour qualifier la forme de guerre choisie par les repr\u00e9sentants de la civilisation occidentale pour abattre le r\u00e9gime Saddam Hussein, disons, entre stupidit\u00e9 criminelle et cruaut\u00e9 barbare ; il se pourrait qu’aveuglement bureaucratique fasse l’affaire, en r\u00e9sumant le tout.<\/p><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" On commente la nouvelle de la guerre corrompue 25 mai 2003 La question essentielle de la corruption des g\u00e9n\u00e9raux irakiens, confirm\u00e9e par un article de Defense News dont nous avons fait une pr\u00e9sentation le 20 mai, commence \u00e0 appara\u00eetre dans le domaine public, au travers de divers articles reprenant l’information. Nous avons signal\u00e9 hier un… <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"neve_meta_sidebar":"","neve_meta_container":"","neve_meta_enable_content_width":"","neve_meta_content_width":0,"neve_meta_title_alignment":"","neve_meta_author_avatar":"","neve_post_elements_order":"","neve_meta_disable_header":"","neve_meta_disable_footer":"","neve_meta_disable_title":"","_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[2623,3858,3019,948,857,1447,4003,3099,4004],"class_list":["post-65621","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-faits-et-commentaires","tag-bureaucratie","tag-corruption","tag-defense","tag-franks","tag-irak","tag-kaplan","tag-news","tag-psychologie","tag-slate"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/new.dedefensa.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/65621","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/new.dedefensa.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/new.dedefensa.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/new.dedefensa.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/new.dedefensa.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=65621"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/new.dedefensa.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/65621\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/new.dedefensa.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=65621"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/new.dedefensa.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=65621"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/new.dedefensa.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=65621"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}