{"id":66090,"date":"2004-09-27T00:00:00","date_gmt":"2004-09-27T00:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/new.dedefensa.org\/index.php\/2004\/09\/27\/la-destruction-methodique-de-la-puissance-americaine\/"},"modified":"2004-09-27T00:00:00","modified_gmt":"2004-09-27T00:00:00","slug":"la-destruction-methodique-de-la-puissance-americaine","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/new.dedefensa.org\/index.php\/2004\/09\/27\/la-destruction-methodique-de-la-puissance-americaine\/","title":{"rendered":"La destruction m\u00e9thodique de la puissance am\u00e9ricaine<\/em><\/strong>"},"content":{"rendered":"

La destruction m\u00e9thodique de la puissance am\u00e9ricaine<\/h2>\n<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

\t27 septembre 2004 Deux articles parus le 25 septembre, de deux excellents chroniqueurs am\u00e9ricains, William S. Lind et Jim Lobe, attirent notre attention sur un fait fondamental : la destruction m\u00e9thodique, syst\u00e9matique, de la puissance militaire am\u00e9ricaine par ceux-l\u00e0 m\u00eame qui en usent.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

\t• William S. Lind constate que la Garde Nationale am\u00e9rticaine est en train d’\u00eatre d\u00e9truite<\/a> par le r\u00e9gime que lui fait subir l’administration GW. Les exemples commencent \u00e0 abonder, d’unit\u00e9s form\u00e9es \u00e0 la h\u00e2te, forc\u00e9es \u00e0 partir au combat en Irak (40% des effectifs sont form\u00e9es d’unit\u00e9s de la Garde Nationale et de la R\u00e9serve). Ces conditions initiales d\u00e9sastreuses, ajout\u00e9es aux conditions du d\u00e9ploiement en Irak, am\u00e8nent des effets d\u00e9sastreux. Dans les quelques unit\u00e9s rapatri\u00e9es d’Irak, on constate que 70% des effectifs quittent imm\u00e9diatement la Garde Nationale. Cela laisse pr\u00e9sager que c’est l’int\u00e9gralit\u00e9 de l’institution qui est menac\u00e9e, alors que son r\u00f4le au niveau des \u00c9tats de l’Union est essentiel (maintien de l’ordre, intervention humanitaire en cas de catastrophe, etc). L’effet g\u00e9n\u00e9ral est d\u00e9sastreux au niveau des unit\u00e9s, o\u00f9 le climat r\u00e9gnant dans l’arm\u00e9e am\u00e9ricaine dans les ann\u00e9es 1969-72 (drogue, indiscipline, d\u00e9sertions, etc) est en passe de rena\u00eetre.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

\t\u00ab The unit knew it would soon be shipped to the front. Some soldiers responded by deserting. Others got drunk and fought. In response, officers locked the unit in its barracks, allowing the troops out only to drill, not even to smoke a cigarette, until it could be put on the transport that would take it into combat.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/p>\n

\t\u00bb It sounds as if I am describing some third echelon Soviet infantry regiment in, say, 1942. In fact, I am talking about the 1st Battalion of the 178th Field Artillery Regiment, South Carolina National Guard, in September 2004. According to a front-page story in the Sept. 19 Washington Post, the unit was disintegrating even before it was deployed to Iraq. One shudders to think what will happen once it gets there and finds itself under daily attack from skilled enemies it cannot identify.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/p>\n

\t\u00bb One of the likely effects of the disastrous war in Iraq will be the destruction of an old American institution, the National Guard. Desperate for troops as the situation in Iraq deteriorates, Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld is using the National Guard in a mission for which it was never intended: carrying on a war of choice halfway around the world. Most Guardsmen enlisted expecting to help their neighbors in natural disasters, or perhaps maintain order locally in the event of rioting. They never signed up for Vietnam II.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/p>\n

\t\u00bb Yes, the Guard was mobilized and deployed overseas in both World Wars, but those were true national wars, in which the American people were all involved one way or another. Cabinet wars, as they used to be called, are something altogether different. As Frederick the Great said, cabinet wars must be waged in such a manner that the people do not know they are going on. But National Guardsmen are the people. To send them into a cabinet war is to misuse them in a way that will destroy them. Even in the American Revolution, militiamen were seldom asked to fight outside their own state. When they were, they usually responded by deserting.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/p>\n

\t\u00bb The fault does not lie with the soldiers of the National Guard. Even within their units, they are being horribly misused. One of the Guard’s strengths is unit cohesion: members of a unit come from the same place and usually know each other well, both in the unit, where they serve long-term, and often in the local community as well. In the case of the 1st Battalion, 178th Field Artillery, the Post reports that to fully man the unit, scores of soldiers were pulled in from different Guard outfits, some voluntarily, some on orders. Cohesion went out the window. One soldier in the unit said, Our moral isn’t high enough for us to be away for 18 months. I think a lot of guys will break down in Iraq. That is always what happens when unit cohesion is destroyed, in every army in history.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/p>\n

\t\u00bb For many Guardsmen, deployment to Iraq means economic ruin. They have mortgage payments, car payments, credit card debt, all calculated on their civilian salaries. Suddenly, for a year or more, their pay drops to that of a private. The families they leave behind face the loss of everything they have. What militia wouldn’t desert in that situation?<\/em> \u00bb<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

\t• Jim Lobe met l’accent sur un autre aspect des activit\u00e9s des forces arm\u00e9es, avec l’histoire de Crazy Mike<\/em> (Mike le dingue), chef d’une unit\u00e9 des Forces Sp\u00e9ciales am\u00e9ricaines d\u00e9ploy\u00e9es en Afghanistan. Dans ce cas, il s’agit de la situation inverse. Ces unit\u00e9s des forces sp\u00e9ciales sont laiss\u00e9es sans aucun contr\u00f4le, avec des moyens consid\u00e9rables, dans des pays \u00e9trangers o\u00f9 elles se conduisent sans aucun souci de la l\u00e9galit\u00e9, avec des comportements impliquant l’usage syst\u00e9matique des s\u00e9vices, des assassinats, d’actions qu’on ne peut d\u00e9crire que comme criminelles, etc. Lobe termine l’histoire de Crazy Mike<\/em> par une r\u00e9f\u00e9rence circonstanci\u00e9e \u00e0 Robert D. Kalan, auteur fameux (et proche des n\u00e9o-conservateurs) dans les salons de Washington pour ses th\u00e8ses sur la guerre moderne.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

\t\u00ab Kaplan, whose 2001 best-selling book, Warrior Politics: Why Leadership Demands a Pagan Ethos, extolled waging war without mercy, has long argued that maintaining global order is a rough business and that even successful wars like those against the Indians or the U.S. counter-insurgency campaign in the Philippines a century ago inevitably lead to excesses. The extent that they can be kept out of the media spotlight which, of course, is precisely what the Bush administration has tried to do is all to the good, according to Kaplan’s perspective.<\/em> <\/p>\n<\/p>\n

\t\u00bb In Indian country’, as one general officer told me, you want to whack bad guys quietly and cover your tracks with humanitarian-aid projects,’ Kaplan wrote Tuesday. The red Indian metaphor is one with which a liberal policy nomenklatura may be uncomfortable, he went on, but Army and Marine field officers have embraced it because it captures perfectly the combat challenge of the early 21st century.<\/em> <\/p>\n<\/p>\n

\t\u00bb Noting that it was the great Victorian leader, William Gladstone, who called on British troops to protect the sanctity of life in the hill villages of Afghanistan, Kaplan stressed that U.S. leaders must also appeal to the idealism of their citizens in another article he wrote last year on U.S. supremacy. Americans are truly idealistic by nature, but even if we weren’t, our historical and geographical circumstances necessitate that U.S. foreign policy be robed in idealism, Kaplan wrote in the same article. And yet security concerns necessarily make our foreign policy more pagan.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/p>\n

\t\u00bb Speak Victorian, Think Pagan, he advised U.S. policymakers. And, thus, while the UN delegates must have heard Bush’s rhetoric about human dignity, they might have been thinking about Crazy Mike in Indian Country.<\/em> \u00bb<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

\tCes deux tendances qu’on rel\u00e8ve dans l’\u00e9volution des forces arm\u00e9es am\u00e9ricaines, bien que d\u00e9velopp\u00e9es en fonction de la r\u00e9f\u00e9rence mythique de la Guerre contre la Terreur, repr\u00e9sentent en r\u00e9alit\u00e9 une \u00e9volution parfaitement correspondante \u00e0 celle de l’administration GW. Bien que celle-ci ait \u00e9t\u00e9 triomphalement (notamment par les n\u00e9o-conservateurs) d\u00e9sign\u00e9e comme un mod\u00e8le du retour \u00e0 un \u00c9tat central puissant, au nom de la lutte contre cette fameuse Guerre contre la Terreur, en r\u00e9alit\u00e9 cet accroissement de la puissance publique ne concerne que l’accroissement des d\u00e9penses (d’ailleurs avec la cons\u00e9quence du d\u00e9veloppement d’un d\u00e9ficit colossal). La d\u00e9volution des responsabilit\u00e9s se poursuit, avec notamment le d\u00e9sint\u00e9r\u00eat pour les cadres classiques des forces arm\u00e9es, notamment ceux qui d\u00e9pendent de la discipline militaire contr\u00f4l\u00e9e par l’autorit\u00e9 gouvernementale, et par contre l’appel \u00e0 la privatisation et \u00e0 l’absence de contr\u00f4le dans le chef d’organisations devenues presque para-militaires m\u00eame si elles d\u00e9pendent encore nominalement de l’autorit\u00e9 centrale.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

\tCela illustre un d\u00e9sint\u00e9r\u00eat grandissant pour les structures internes du pays (l’Am\u00e9rique), sauf pour l’appel aux imp\u00f4ts et l’appel aux \u00e9lecteurs par la tromperie organis\u00e9e des circuit de communication. C’est ce que Michael S. Lind expose de cette fa\u00e7on, en citant l’expression de Versailles sur Potomac pour d\u00e9signer Washington D.C., qui est de plus en plus coup\u00e9 du pays r\u00e9el, comme l’\u00e9tait la Cour du roi de France : \u00ab What the Washington elite that wages cabinet wars does not understand, or care about, is the vital role the National Guard plays on the state and local levels. <\/em>[] The fact of the matter is that Versailles on the Potomac does not care about the rest of the country in any respect, so long as the tax dollars keep coming in. My old friend King Louis XVI might be able to tell Rumsfeld & Co. where that road eventually ends up.<\/em> \u00bb<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

\tCette situation est caract\u00e9ristique du paradoxe de l’administration GW Bush, qui appuie son appel \u00e0 la population sur des valeurs populistes (au sens am\u00e9ricain du terme) et organise une politique et une action exactement inverses \u00e0 ces valeurs. Si cette tendance se poursuit, il s’agit effectivement d’une orientation explosive, comme le sugg\u00e8re Michael S. Lind. La d\u00e9sint\u00e9gration structurelle en cours des forces arm\u00e9es am\u00e9ricaines est un ph\u00e9nom\u00e8ne qui ne pourra rester cantonn\u00e9 \u00e0 ces seules forces.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

La destruction m\u00e9thodique de la puissance am\u00e9ricaine 27 septembre 2004 Deux articles parus le 25 septembre, de deux excellents chroniqueurs am\u00e9ricains, William S. Lind et Jim Lobe, attirent notre attention sur un fait fondamental : la destruction m\u00e9thodique, syst\u00e9matique, de la puissance militaire am\u00e9ricaine par ceux-l\u00e0 m\u00eame qui en usent. • William S. Lind constate… <\/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":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[3236,4356,3460,2936,2819,1012,1094,4357,3812,2937,3344],"class_list":["post-66090","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-faits-et-commentaires","tag-afghanistan","tag-crazy","tag-forces","tag-garde","tag-jim","tag-lind","tag-lobe","tag-michael","tag-mike","tag-nationale","tag-special"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/new.dedefensa.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/66090","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=66090"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/new.dedefensa.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/66090\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/new.dedefensa.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=66090"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/new.dedefensa.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=66090"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/new.dedefensa.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=66090"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}