{"id":66135,"date":"2004-11-18T00:00:00","date_gmt":"2004-11-18T00:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/new.dedefensa.org\/index.php\/2004\/11\/18\/comment-les-neocons-washingtoniens-sont-un-symptome-dun-systeme-corrompu-et-decadent-une-analyse-sociologique\/"},"modified":"2004-11-18T00:00:00","modified_gmt":"2004-11-18T00:00:00","slug":"comment-les-neocons-washingtoniens-sont-un-symptome-dun-systeme-corrompu-et-decadent-une-analyse-sociologique","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/new.dedefensa.org\/index.php\/2004\/11\/18\/comment-les-neocons-washingtoniens-sont-un-symptome-dun-systeme-corrompu-et-decadent-une-analyse-sociologique\/","title":{"rendered":"Comment les \u201cn\u00e9ocons\u201d washingtoniens sont un sympt\u00f4me d’un syst\u00e8me corrompu et d\u00e9cadent : une analyse sociologique<\/em><\/strong>"},"content":{"rendered":"

Comment les n\u00e9ocons washingtoniens sont un sympt\u00f4me d’un syst\u00e8me corrompu et d\u00e9cadent : une analyse sociologique<\/h3>\n<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

\tLe mouvement n\u00e9o-conservateur est l’un des principaux ph\u00e9nom\u00e8nes aux USA ces cinq derni\u00e8res ann\u00e9es. Leur influence est consid\u00e9rable et n’est pas pr\u00eate de s’effacer, contrairement \u00e0 ce que d’aucuns esp\u00e8rent et annoncent depuis plusieurs mois.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

\tLes n\u00e9ocons<\/em>, ce n’est pas seulement un ph\u00e9nom\u00e8ne politique. C’est un ph\u00e9nom\u00e8ne sociologique, quelque chose qui sugg\u00e8re un changement structurel de l’establishment<\/em>. Le texte ci-dessous pr\u00e9sente un aspect tr\u00e8s peu connu du mouvement. L’auteur est l’anthropologue sociale Janine R. Wedel, qui publie un texte sur le site de Pacific News Service (PNS)<\/a>.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

\tL’int\u00e9r\u00eat du texte est le parall\u00e8le fait par Wedel entre les n\u00e9ocons<\/em> et certaines \u00e9lites id\u00e9ologico-mafieuses qui ont tenu le haut du pav\u00e9 dans les r\u00e9gimes communistes sur la fin de ces r\u00e9gimes, puis apr\u00e8s la chute de ces r\u00e9gimes. Effectivement, certains ennuis de Richard Perle ont r\u00e9v\u00e9l\u00e9 les implications mercantiles et corrompues des n\u00e9o-conservateurs.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

\tCette analyse montre que les n\u00e9o-conservateurs sont bien plus qu’un accident, voire un coup d’Etat bureaucratique. Ils sont un sympt\u00f4me fondamental de l’\u00e9volution d\u00e9cadente acc\u00e9l\u00e9r\u00e9e du syst\u00e8me, avec la collusion entre le monde de l’argent et le monde des experts et des id\u00e9ologues \u00e0 Washington.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Neocon Flex Players Await Bush’s Second Term<\/h2>\n<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

\tBy Janine R. Wedel, Pacific News Service, Nov 03, 2004<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/p>\n

\tEditor’s Note: Forget the \u00a0\u00bbrevolving door\u00a0\u00bb between government and private interests. New \u00a0\u00bbflex players\u00a0\u00bb on the political scene, writes PNS contributor and social anthropologist Janine R. Wedel, exist on both sides of the door at once. President Bush’s re-election will likely further empower model flex players, a core group of neoconservatives.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

\tAs a social anthropologist I observed the collapse of communism in Eastern Europe and the rise of powerful, close-knit circles that filled the leadership vacuum and seized large chunks of state-owned wealth. These exclusive groups resemble the neoconservative or \u00a0\u00bbneocon\u00a0\u00bb core of 10 or so players who helped push the United States into Iraq. The rise of this neocon power circle — and its continued prominence within and without the second-term Bush administration — signals troubling changes in American governing and policymaking.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

\tThe Eastern European former apparatchiks and the American neocons share many characteristics. They specialize in blurring state and private interests and spheres. They are skilled at skirting both the government’s rules of accountability and business codes of competition. They have created new norms that make bureaucracy more like business and business more contingent on government.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

\tIn \u00a0\u00bbThe Power Elite,\u00a0\u00bb written a half century ago, C. Wright Mills noted that three interlocking prongs of power — corporations, the military and the political elite — were diminishing the authority of elected officials. That trend is stronger today. The outsourcing and privatization of government functions in the name of efficiency and cost savings have led to the delegation of more authority to private entities and new opportunities for strategically placed groups of actors to co-opt public policy agendas.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

\tThis was certainly the case in Eastern Europe. After the revolutions of 1989, when states began divesting themselves of state-owned resources, informal groups worked in and around the crumbling systems to grab state-owned firms and other resources at fire-sale prices. Players soon learned that wearing multiple hats was the most effective modus operandi. In Poland, officials often presented visitors with two or more sets of calling cards — their official government ones, and cards naming their position in an NGO or consulting firm, sometimes even one that did business with the public office they headed. Schooled under communism in dodging the overbearing state, \u00a0\u00bbmafias\u00a0\u00bb and \u00a0\u00bbclans\u00a0\u00bb positioned themselves at the state-private nexus of activity to mold the emerging system to their advantage.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

\tI call these exclusive, informal factions \u00a0\u00bbflex groups,\u00a0\u00bb for their ease in playing multiple and overlapping roles and conflating state and private interests. These players keep appearing in different incarnations, ensuring continuity even as their operating environments change.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

\tThe flex groups’ activity in unraveling communist states was more intense than in stable societies such as the United States. However, with the outsourcing of government functions flex players are now becoming a fixture in American politics, too. Today, consulting firms, NGOs, think tanks and public-private partnerships are doing more of the work of government than do civil servants. They write budgets, manage other contractors and make and implement policy. While government contracts are on the rise, driven in part by the demand for military, nation-building and homeland security services, the number of civil servants available to oversee them is falling. Clinton-era efforts to streamline bureaucracy have further decreased the government’s oversight capacity. <\/p>\n<\/p>\n

\tThe resulting labyrinth presents openings for flex groups to co-opt public policy portfolios and dilute effective monitoring and study of alternative policies. It also makes the flex group mode of operating attractive to an impatient administration. Cohesion and activism make it effective and an asset to a president, except when it becomes a liability. The neocon core, with a long-held strategy for American policy toward the Middle East, had just such an appeal. The group not only had goals that coincided with those of the Bush II administration, it also had a ready-made strategy to achieve them.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

\tFlex groups’ interactions are far more complex than traditional good-old-boy networks-such as the \u00a0\u00bbWise Men\u00a0\u00bb who re-fashioned American foreign policy at the end of World War II or John F. Kennedy’s \u00a0\u00bbBest and Brightest\u00a0\u00bb who executed the Vietnam War in the 1960s.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

\tAs flex players, the neocons have had myriad roles over time. They quietly promoted one another for influential positions and coordinated their multi-pronged efforts inside and outside government in pursuit of agendas that were always in their own interest, but not necessarily the public’s.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

\tConsider the ties among three members of the neocon core: Richard Perle, former chairman of the Defense Policy Board; Paul Wolfowitz, deputy secretary of defense; and Douglas Feith, undersecretary for policy in the Defense Department. In 1973, Perle helped his friend Wolfowitz find work in the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency. In 1982 Perle, as assistant secretary for international security policy in President Reagan’s Defense Department, hired and later promoted Feith after the latter was fired as Middle East analyst from the National Security Council. A couple of years after leaving the Pentagon, Perle became a highly paid consultant for the lobbying firm International Advisers Inc., which Feith set up in 1989. By serving as a consultant to the firm, Perle-who had just finished a seven-year stint at the Pentagon, during which he supervised U.S. military assistance to Turkey-was able to bypass federal regulations that prohibited officials from serving foreign interests right after leaving government.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

\tThe \u00a0\u00bbmutual aid society\u00a0\u00bb of these three central figures continues to this day. In 2001 Perle and Wolfowitz (as deputy secretary of defense) saw to it that Feith was appointed undersecretary for policy in the Defense Department. Feith, in turn, selected Perle for appointment as chairman of the Defense Policy Board. (Perle resigned as chairman in March 2003 amid allegations of conflicts of interest, and from the board altogether a year later.)<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

\tFlex players are not necessarily engaged in unethical activity, but they always help each other out in furthering their careers, livelihoods and mutual aims. Even when some players are \u00a0\u00bbin power\u00a0\u00bb within an administration, they are flanked by people outside of formal government. Flex groups have a culture of circumventing authorities and creating alternative ones. They operate through semi-closed networks and penetrate key institutions, revamping them to marginalize other potential players and replacing them with initiatives under their control.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

\tThe neocon core has set up its own duplicative entities in government that often enable them to bypass or override the input of otherwise relevant bodies. Two secretive units in the Pentagon were created under Feith and staffed in part by people recruited by Perle from neocon circles. The core empowered shadow hubs of decision-making, including the \u00a0\u00bbmini National Security Council,\u00a0\u00bb a small circle of influence within the NSC, and a similar group in the vice president’s office.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

\tThe blurring and overlapping public and private roles and offices enable players to avoid accountability. Perle, for example, surfaces at the epicenter of a head-spinning array of business firms, consultancies, lobbying and ideological initiatives, consistently evading accusations of impropriety that have been leveled against him.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

\tToday’s most successful players have gone beyond the revolving door, in which executive-branch officials and members of Congress become industry lobbyists upon leaving office, or industry leaders become officials who help regulate their own industries. Revolving-door careerists are now joined by flex players, who may be on both sides of the door at the same time — or for whom the door itself has vanished.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

\tFlex groups bring impressive energy and staying power in pursuit of their financial and\/or ideological bottom line, but they are inherently unaccountable to the public. Their rise pre-dates the George W. Bush administration. But Bush’s second term will likely embolden this growing cadre of flex players and others like it, to the detriment of democracy.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

\tWedel is an associate professor in the School of Public Policy at George Mason University. She is writing a book tentatively titled \u00a0\u00bbChameleons in Command: Shadow Power in a Globalizing World.\u00a0\u00bb<\/em><\/p>\n<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

\t[Notre recommandation est que ce texte doit \u00eatre lu avec la mention classique \u00e0 l’esprit, Disclaimer: In accordance with 17 U.S.C. 107, this material is distributed without profit or payment to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving this information for non-profit research and educational purposes only..]<\/em><\/strong> <\/p>\n<\/p>\n

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

Comment les n\u00e9ocons washingtoniens sont un sympt\u00f4me d’un syst\u00e8me corrompu et d\u00e9cadent : une analyse sociologique Le mouvement n\u00e9o-conservateur est l’un des principaux ph\u00e9nom\u00e8nes aux USA ces cinq derni\u00e8res ann\u00e9es. Leur influence est consid\u00e9rable et n’est pas pr\u00eate de s’effacer, contrairement \u00e0 ce que d’aucuns esp\u00e8rent et annoncent depuis plusieurs mois. Les n\u00e9ocons, ce n’est… <\/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":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-66135","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-notes-de-lectures"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/new.dedefensa.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/66135","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=66135"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/new.dedefensa.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/66135\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/new.dedefensa.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=66135"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/new.dedefensa.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=66135"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/new.dedefensa.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=66135"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}