U.S. Navy<\/a> comme acteur central de l’affaire, la Navy dont on sait qu’elle n’est nullement va-t’en-guerre dans la r\u00e9gion. Jim Lobe pr\u00e9sente donc une th\u00e8se dont nous ne serions pas \u00e9tonn\u00e9s qu’elle ait \u00e9t\u00e9 aliment\u00e9e par l’une ou l’autre source proche de la m\u00eame U.S. Navy. Il s’agirait alors d’un montage, soit complet soit partiel, pour obtenir l’assentiment de la direction civile washingtonienne pour \u00e9tablir un accord de bon voisinage entre la flotte US et la marine iranienne. L’U.S. Navy aurait saisi cette occasion du voyage de Bush dans la r\u00e9gion pour mettre en \u00e9vidence les dangers de tels incidents et laisser aux divers interlocuteurs arabes du pr\u00e9sident le soin de faire pression sur lui pour effectivement renforcer l’id\u00e9e d’un tel accord.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n\t\u00abIt’s been no secret for some time now that the Pentagon, and the head of the U.S. Central Command (CENTCOM), Adm. William Fallon, in particular, have been pressing the White House without success for negotiating a new incidents at sea agreement with Iran that would reduce the risk of a an accidental confrontation in the Straits of Hormuz and the Gulf itself. As pointed out in an important Washington Post column by David Ignatius last September, ‘(t)he big problem isn’t the regular Iranian navy but the naval forces of the Revolutionary Guard. Ignatius went on to report that in early September, CENTCOM’s naval chief, Vice Adm. Kevin Cosgriff who, of course, was the first to brief the press on last Sunday’s incident appeared on a panel with the brother of the commander of the Revolutionary Guard in Geneva the week before.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/p>\n\t\u00bbThis chance encounter should be pursued, wrote Ignatius, who noted that America’s top military commanders in the Gulf (that would include Cosgriff) were lobbying for a new incidents-at-sea agreement. The United States and Iran, Ignatius went on, are playing a game of chicken’ in the Middle East. A collision would be ruinous for both. Each side needs to be careful to avoid miscalculation. Interestingly, during an NPR interview Friday, Harlan Ullman, a Washington Times columnist and a senior adviser at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) (who also commanded a destroyer deployed to the Gulf during the Iran-Iraq War in the 1980s), stressed that Sunday’s incident underlined the importance of a new incidents-at-sea accord with Iran, noting that such an agreement was very successful in preventing maritime confrontations between the Soviet Union and the U.S. during the Cold War.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/p>\n\t\u00bbWithin that context, the timing of the Pentagon’s decision to publicize what really an apparently not-particularly-threatening incident involving Revolutionary Guard speedboats is particularly intriguing as I suspect there have been more serious incidents in the recent past. Frustrated until now in their efforts to get the White House to authorize negotiations over a new agreement, could it be that Fallon (who worked very hard to improve military ties sometimes over the objections of Donald Rumsfeld with China as the commander of the Ninth Fleet), Cosgriff, and other Pentagon and Navy officials decided to dramatize the danger just as Bush was embarking on his trip, anticipating that the president would get an earful from his Gulf state hosts about their fears that a naval confrontation could quickly escalate into a real war in which they would suffer significant collateral damage?<\/em>\u00bb<\/p>\n<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
\tMis en ligne le 12 janvier 2008 \u00e0 11H55<\/p><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
L’incident du Golfe Persique suscite beaucoup plus de commentaires qu’il n’alimente de r\u00e9elles tensions. Il semblerait bien, et ce depuis la NIE 2007, que l’heure de l’attaque-surprise imminente soit pass\u00e9e. Jim Lobe nous donne, sur son site, hier, quelques pr\u00e9cisions int\u00e9ressantes. D’une part, Lobe note le silence complet des n\u00e9o-conservateurs sur cette affaire. En temps… <\/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":[2],"tags":[6296,3723,1094,3319],"class_list":["post-69596","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-bloc-notes","tag-fallon","tag-golfe","tag-lobe","tag-navy"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/new.dedefensa.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/69596","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=69596"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/new.dedefensa.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/69596\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/new.dedefensa.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=69596"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/new.dedefensa.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=69596"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/new.dedefensa.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=69596"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}