Contents · LRB 17 December 2015

Is this how democracy ends ?
▻http://www.lrb.co.uk/v38/n23/david-runciman/is-this-how-democracy-ends

The Clinton campaign, which included Obama in the later stages, made it sound as though Trump were a genuine outlier from basic democratic norms, capable of tearing the whole thing down were he to triumph. In the second presidential debate, Clinton effectively accused him of working for a hostile foreign power, of being a stooge of the Russian regime. Had that been true, then the national security state ought by now to be swinging into action in order to protect the republic. Generals appearing on television to take charge would be an appropriate response to the risk of the nuclear codes falling into enemy hands. Instead, the American state has pivoted as rapidly as it normally does to accommodate its new master and to offer its services to his cause, in the hope of making that cause reasonably effective. Obama came on television to insist that he wishes Trump well, because if Trump succeeds then America succeeds. This suggests that the people who voted for him were right to suspect that the system would do everything in its power to soften the blow of their choice. It also means that if Trump poses a serious threat to American democracy, we lack the language to express it.

[...]

Trump is a child, the most childish politician I have encountered in my lifetime. The parent in this relationship is the American state itself, which allows the voters to throw a tantrum and join forces with the worst behaved kid in the class, safe in the knowledge that the grown-ups will always be there to pick up the pieces.

This is where the real risks lie. It is not possible to keep behaving like this without damaging the basic machinery of democratic government. It takes an extraordinarily fine-tuned political intelligence to target popular anger at the parts of the state that need reform while leaving intact the parts that make that reform possible. Trump – and indeed Brexit – are not that. They are the bluntest of instruments, indiscriminately shaking the foundations with nothing to offer by way of support. Under these conditions, the likeliest response is for the grown-ups in the room to hunker down, waiting for the storm to pass. While they do, politics atrophies and necessary change is put off by the overriding imperative of avoiding systemic collapse. The understandable desire to keep the tanks off the streets and the cashpoints open gets in the way of tackling the long-term threats we face. Fake disruption followed by institutional paralysis, and all the while the real dangers continue to mount. Ultimately, that is how democracy ends.

#Etats-Unis #démocratie

Islamic State v. al-Qaida
Owen Bennett-Jones
▻http://www.lrb.co.uk/v38/n21/owen-bennett-jones/islamic-state-v-al-qaida

For Paul Rogers, violent jihadism is a symptom first and foremost of global inequality, a revolt from the margins by people who see no evidence that increases in total global wealth are a benefit to them. On the contrary, improvements in education and mass communication only mean that they can appreciate more clearly the extent of their disadvantage and marginalisation. In that sense they are not all that different from the Naxalites in India, the Maoists in Nepal and Peru and the Zapatistas in Mexico.

There are other, on the face of it more surprising, non-religious sources of jihadi violence. The jihadists may have severely disrupted the international system of nation states, but they have had support in doing so from ‘enemy’ governments. The story of the United States and Saudi Arabia helping Osama bin Laden fight the Soviets in Afghanistan is now familiar. Iran supported Zarqawi in Iraq, tolerating his slaughter of Shias because he offered the most effective opposition to the US occupation of Iraq. Syria took the same view, allowing al-Qaida in Iraq’s fighters to slip across the border. One of Hillary Clinton’s leaked emails reveals that as recently as 2014 she believed Qatar and Saudi Arabia were providing ‘clandestine financial and logistic support’ to IS. Turkey also helped both organisations in Syria in the hope that they would oust Assad. Even Assad himself helped them. Calculating that the jihadists would not have the strength to oust him, he released them from jail, bought oil from IS and bombed the Free Syrian Army while leaving IS positions alone. Assad’s idea was to scare either the Americans or the Russians into defending his regime. Putin took the bait.

These policies generally turn sour. A direct line can be drawn from American support for the Afghan Mujahidin to 9/11. Iran’s backing of Zarqawi may have helped Tehran gain influence in the power vacuum left by America’s withdrawal from Iraq, but the Iranians now find themselves having to raise militias to confront IS. Assad and Erdoğan both believed that, having used the violent jihadis to further their purposes in Syria, they could dispose of them when they were no longer needed. Whether that will be as easy as Ankara and Damascus hope remains an open question.

There is another aspect to these machinations. Governments of all types reckon it is better to export violent jihadism than to experience it at home. The Saudis have been the most brazen advocates of this policy but before 9/11 many Middle Eastern governments complained that the UK offered sanctuary to Islamists in the hope that London would not be attacked. And papers captured in Osama bin Laden’s Abbottabad hideout revealed that the chief minister of Punjab, Shahbaz Sharif, offered al-Qaida a restoration of good relations with the Pakistan government in return for no attacks in his province.

#apprentis_sorciers #mėdiocrité_meurtrière

Naomi Klein · Let Them Drown · LRB 2 June 2016
▻http://www.lrb.co.uk/v38/n11/naomi-klein/let-them-drown

Just as bombs follow oil, and drones follow drought, so boats follow both: boats filled with refugees fleeing homes on the aridity line ravaged by war and drought. And the same capacity for dehumanising the other that justified the bombs and drones is now being trained on these migrants, casting their need for security as a threat to ours, their desperate flight as some sort of invading army. Tactics refined on the West Bank and in other occupation zones are now making their way to North America and Europe.

http://cdn.lrb.co.uk/assets/edillus/klei02_3811_01.jpg

#migrations #changement_climatique #pétrole #guerre #Edward_Said

Stuck in Sicily

On a sound file sent to me via WhatsApp, a teenage girl sobs, and an older woman says: ‘Don’t worry, the white people will help you.’ The girl is 17, from a village in Edo state in Nigeria. A family friend came to her house, she says, and asked her parents if they’d like to send their daughter to work in Europe. The friend didn’t say what kind of work she would be doing, only that she would earn money she could bring home, after she had paid back a bond of €5000. They made her swear an oath that she would honour the debt, then sent her north, through Niger and across the Sahara to Libya. The journey took several months. By the time she reached Libya she had discovered that when she finally arrived in Europe she would be forced into sex work.

▻http://www.lrb.co.uk/v38/n09/daniel-trilling/stuck-in-sicily?platform=hootsuite
#Sicile #Italie #antichambre #zone_d'attente #asile #migrations #réfugiés #accueil

David Blackbourn reviews ‘Weimar’ by Michael Kater · LRB 19 May 2016

▻http://www.lrb.co.uk/v38/n10/david-blackbourn/princes-counts-and-racists

Pay-wallmais je crois que ça vaut la peine

▻http://cdn.lrb.co.uk/assets/covers/q/cov3810.jpg?1462968560

In March 1932, Thomas Mann visited Weimar in central Germany. For the last thirty years of the 18th century, this modestly sized town was home to Goethe, Schiller, Herder and Wieland, but by the 1930s it had become a hotbed of the radical right. ‘The admixture of Hitlerism and Goethe affects one strangely,’ Mann wrote in ‘Meine Goethereise’. ‘Of course, Weimar is a centre of Hitlerdom. Everywhere you could see Hitler’s picture etc in the National Socialist newspapers on exhibit. The town was dominated by the type of young person who walks through the streets vaguely determined, offering the Roman salute.’ Cultural greatness in decline and the juxtaposition of Goethe with Hitler – these are the two narrative axes along which Michael Kater tells the story of Weimar.

Crisis in Brazil
Perry Anderson
▻http://www.lrb.co.uk/v38/n08/perry-anderson/crisis-in-brazil

Popular mobilisation to stop the ouster of Dilma [...] is fettered by the legacy of PT rule. The party is in a weak position to call on its beneficiaries to defend it, for at least three reasons. The first is simply that, if corruption lost it the middle-class sympathy it once enjoyed, austerity has alienated the much larger lower-class base it acquired. The demonstrations it has so far been able to mount against impeachment have been much less imposing than those calling for it. Marchers have been mustered mainly from public sector workers and unions: the poor are conspicuous by their absence. The PT’s rural bailiwicks in the north-east are anyway socially dispersed, as the big cities of the centre-south that are the strongholds of the new right are not. Then there has been the inevitable demoralisation as successive scandals have engulfed the party, a diffuse sense of guilt, however suppressed, weakening any fighting spirit. Lastly, and fundamentally, by the time Lula won power the party had become essentially an electoral machine, financed overwhelmingly by corporate donations rather than – as at the beginning – by members’ dues, contenting itself with passive adhesion to the name of its leader, lacking any will to foster collective action among its voters. The active mobilisation that brought it into being in the manufacturing centres of Brazil became a distant memory as the party gained support in zones of the country and layers of the population untouched by industry, with deep-rooted traditions of submission to authority and fear of disorder. This was a political culture Lula understood, and did not seriously attempt to unsettle. In his vision of things, the potential cost was too high. To help the masses, he sought harmony with the elites, for whom any vigorous polarisation was taboo. In 2002 he finally won the presidency, at his fourth attempt, on a slogan of ‘peace and love’. In 2016, faced with political lynching, he was still uttering the same two words to crowds expecting something more combative.

[...]

The Workers’ Party believed, after a time, that it could use the established order in Brazil to benefit the poor, without harm – indeed with help – to the rich. It did benefit the poor, as it set out to do. But once it accepted the price of entry into a diseased political system, the door closed behind it. The party itself withered, becoming an enclave in the state, without self-awareness or strategic direction, so blind that it ostracised André Singer, its best thinker, for a mess of spin-doctors and pollsters, so insensible it took lucre, wherever it came from, as the condition of power. Its achievements will remain. Whether the party will itself do so is an open question. In South America, a cycle is coming to an end. For a decade and a half, relieved of attention by the US, buoyed by the commodities boom, and drawing on deep reserves of popular tradition, the continent was the only part of the world where rebellious social movements coexisted with heterodox governments. In the wake of 2008, there are now plenty of the former elsewhere. But none so far of the latter. A global exception is closing, with no relay yet in sight.

#Brésil #Amérique_du_sud

Laissez-passer

Un article de la London Review of Books compare les formulaires de demande de visa de plusieurs Etats.

Le Pakistan requiert que l’on fournisse un « signe distinctif », son groupe sanguin, sa confession et son dossier militaire. La Birmanie opte pour l’autoportrait : chacun doit donner la couleur de ses cheveux, celle de ses yeux, sa taille et sa couleur de peau. La République démocratique du Congo [RDC] exige qu’on prouve sa « bonne moralité » et qu’on démontre que son hôte en RDC est bien une « personne physique ou morale ». Le Japon est particulièrement soucieux de savoir si le candidat consomme de la marijuana, de l’opium ou d’autres stupéfiants. La Papouasie-Nouvelle-Guinée, qui met des visas spéciaux à la disposition des propriétaires de yacht, des comédiens et des groupes de gospel, demande un « certificat de bonne santé », une radiographie des poumons, un test de dépistage du VIH [virus de l’immunodéficience humaine] et un certificat de moralité « émis par les autorités de police locales ». La Chine souhaite savoir si vous souffrez de « déséquilibre psychologique sévère » ou de tuberculose pulmonaire (...). La quasi-totalité des pays se montrent curieux d’éventuels antécédents dans le domaine de la prostitution ou du commerce du sexe, mais pas la Thaïlande. (...) La perle demeure le formulaire pour l’obtention d’un visa américain. Il s’intéresse à la stérilisation forcée, à la prostitution, aux maladies contagieuses, à la polygamie, aux « turpitudes morales », à l’espionnage, (...) à la torture (une pratique dégradante dont chacun sait que les Etats-Unis la condamnent), au terrorisme physique ou rhétorique. Et, oui, la question relative à une adhésion au Parti communiste y figure toujours.

▻http://www.lrb.co.uk/v38/n05/frances-stonorsaunders/where-on-earth-are-you #cdp #st

▻http://zinc.mondediplo.net/messages/22410 via Le Monde diplomatique

James Meek · Robin Hood in a Time of Austerity · LRB 18 February 2016
▻http://www.lrb.co.uk/v38/n04/james-meek/robin-hood-in-a-time-of-austerity

Robin Hood is a programme of the left. Robin Hood is Jeremy Corbyn. He’s Russell Brand. He’s Hugo Chávez.

So it used to seem. But a change has come about. The wealthiest and most powerful in Europe, Australasia and North America have turned the myth to their advantage. In this version of Robin Hood the traditional poor – the unemployed, the disabled, refugees – have been put into the conceptual box where the rich used to be. It is they, the social category previously labelled ‘poor’, who are accused of living in big houses, wallowing in luxury and not needing to work, while those previously considered rich are redesignated as the ones who work terribly hard for fair reward or less, forced to support this new category of poor-who-are-considered-rich. In this version the sheriff of Nottingham runs a ruthless realm of plunder and political correctness, ransacking the homesteads of honest peasants for money to finance the conceptual rich – that is, the unemployed, the disabled, refugees, working-class single mothers, dodgers, scroungers, chavs, chisellers and cheats.

In this version of the myth, Robin Hood is a tax-cutter and a handout-denouncer. He’s Jeremy Clarkson. He’s Nigel Farage. He’s Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan. He’s by your elbow in the pub, telling you he knows an immigrant who just waltzed into the social security office and walked out with a cheque for £1000. He’s in the pages of the Daily Mail, fingering a workshy good-for-nothing with 11 children, living in a luxury house on the public purse. He’s sabotaging the sheriff of Nottingham’s wicked tax-gathering devices – speed cameras and parking meters. He’s on talk radio, denouncing inheritance tax. He’s winning elections.

[...]

Today, the key signifier is the phrase ‘hardworking people’. With this expression, right-wing politicians embrace the entire spectrum of employed people with property, from a struggling small-time café owner with a bank loan to Britain’s richest beneficiary of inherited wealth, the multibillionaire Duke of Westminster (who does have a job, looking after his money), and class them as peasants, put-upon smallholders clawing a living from the soil in the face of the sheriff’s cruel tax raids.

#Robin_des_bois #inversion #perversion #sans_vergogne

Adam Shatz · Israel’s Putinisation : Israel’s Putinisation · LRB 18 February 2016
▻http://www.lrb.co.uk/v38/n04/adam-shatz/israels-putinisation

But the unbridled, insular nationalism of Netanyahu’s Israel is also reminiscent of Sisi’s Egypt and Erdoğan’s Turkey, where there is constant talk of foreign plots hatched in Washington and Brussels, and a toxic mix of resentment and entitlement vis-à-vis their Western patrons. As Diana Pinto suggests in Israel Has Moved (2013), the Jewish state has tended to see its neighbours as ‘so many vaulting poles with which to catapult itself into a peaceful because distant globalisation’. Economically, it has succeeded in escaping the region; politically, that goal has proved far more elusive. ‘Israel is now just another Arab regime,’ the Syrian poet Adunis once said to me, and the proposed legislation against ‘moles’ is scarcely different in kind, if not degree, from anti-NGO campaigns in Cairo. The repression of Jewish dissent is the latest phase of what Pinto describes as the ‘turning inward of a state in the process of its own ghettoising’. As if it preferred to remain in that ghetto, Israel has stubbornly carried on a colonial project at the risk of harming its relations with Europe and the United States, both of which are finally realising that Israel has no intention of making a genuine peace with the Palestinian people.

Benedict Anderson · Frameworks of Comparison · LRB 21 January 2016

►http://www.lrb.co.uk/v38/n02/benedict-anderson/frameworks-of-comparison

▻http://cdn.lrb.co.uk/assets/covers/q/cov3802.jpg?1452347183

Benedict Anderson reflects on his intellectual formation

In my early days at Cornell, use of the concept of ‘comparison’ was still somewhat limited. I don’t mean that comparisons were never made: they were made all the time, both consciously and (more often) unconsciously, but invariably in a practical way and on a small scale. Even today, in the Cornell University College of Arts and Sciences, only one department (Comparative Literature) uses the term in its title, and this department did not exist in the early 1960s when I left for Indonesia to undertake fieldwork. Historians, anthropologists, economists and sociologists rarely thought systematically about comparison. The Political Science department was a partial exception, since it had a subsection called Comparative Government, to which I belonged. But the comparisons my classmates and I studied were focused on Western Europe. This was understandable. European countries had for centuries interacted with one another, learned from one another and competed with each other. They also believed that they shared a common civilisation based on antiquity and different Christianities. Comparisons seemed both simple and relevant.

#Benedict_Anderson

Frameworks of Comparison
►http://www.lrb.co.uk/v38/n02/benedict-anderson/frameworks-of-comparison

The 35 years I spent as a professor of government at Cornell taught me two interesting lessons about US academia. The first was that theory, mirroring the style of late capitalism, has obsolescence built into it, in the manner of high-end commodities. In year X students had to read and more or less revere Theory Y, while sharpening their teeth on passé Theory W. Not too many years later, they were told to sharpen their teeth on passé Theory Y, admire Theory Z, and forget about Theory W. The second lesson was that – with some important exceptions like the work of Barrington Moore, Jr – the extension of political science to comparative politics tended to proceed, consciously or unconsciously, on the basis of the US example: one measured how far other countries were progressing in approximating America’s liberty, respect for law, economic development, democracy etc. Hence the rapid rise, and equally rapid fall, of an approach that today looks pretty dead – modernisation theory. Needless to say, there was often an openly stated Cold War objective behind this kind of theory. Namely, to prove that Marxism was fundamentally wrong. In its innocence, this kind of ‘look at me’ theory typically ignored such embarrassing things as the very high murder rate in the US, its hugely disproportionate black prison population, persistent illiteracy and significant levels of political #corruption ..

#Etats-Unis

A lire absolument, le dernier article de « Sy » Hersh dans la London Review of Books, « Military to military » :
►http://www.lrb.co.uk/v38/n01/seymour-m-hersh/military-to-military
Je tente un long résumé avec citations, mais ce serait plutôt à lire in extenso.

A partir de l’été 2013, des membres haut placés dans l’appareil militaire américain (notamment le chef de la DIA M. Flynn et le chef d’état-major M. Dempsey) commencent à s’alarmer des conséquences du programme de la CIA d’armement des « rebelles syriens » en collaboration avec les pétromonarchies et la Turquie. Selon leurs informations il renforcerait les groupes les plus radicaux (parmi lesquels al-Nusra et Da’ich) :

The military’s resistance dates back to the summer of 2013, when a highly classified assessment, put together by the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) and the Joint Chiefs of Staff, then led by General Martin Dempsey, forecast that the fall of the Assad regime would lead to chaos and, potentially, to Syria’s takeover by jihadi extremists, much as was then happening in Libya. A former senior adviser to the Joint Chiefs told me that the document was an ‘all-source’ appraisal, drawing on information from signals, satellite and human intelligence, and took a dim view of the Obama administration’s insistence on continuing to finance and arm the so-called moderate rebel groups. By then, the CIA had been conspiring for more than a year with allies in the UK, Saudi Arabia and Qatar to ship guns and goods – to be used for the overthrow of Assad – from Libya, via Turkey, into Syria. The new intelligence estimate singled out Turkey as a major impediment to Obama’s Syria policy. The document showed, the adviser said, ‘that what was started as a covert US programme to arm and support the moderate rebels fighting Assad had been co-opted by Turkey, and had morphed into an across-the-board technical, arms and logistical programme for all of the opposition, including Jabhat al-Nusra and Islamic State. The so-called moderates had evaporated and the Free Syrian Army was a rump group stationed at an airbase in Turkey.’ The assessment was bleak: there was no viable ‘moderate’ opposition to Assad, and the US was arming extremists.

Ces militaires américains, persuadés que dans ces conditions la chute d’Assad mènerait au chaos, vont tenter de convaincre l’administration Obama de changer de politique en Syrie ; mais en vain.

Flynn told me. ‘We understood Isis’s long-term strategy and its campaign plans, and we also discussed the fact that Turkey was looking the other way when it came to the growth of the Islamic State inside Syria.’ The DIA’s reporting, he said, ‘got enormous pushback’ from the Obama administration. ‘I felt that they did not want to hear the truth.’
‘Our policy of arming the opposition to Assad was unsuccessful and actually having a negative impact,’ the former JCS adviser said. ‘The Joint Chiefs believed that Assad should not be replaced by fundamentalists. The administration’s policy was contradictory. They wanted Assad to go but the opposition was dominated by extremists. So who was going to replace him? To say Assad’s got to go is fine, but if you follow that through – therefore anyone is better. It’s the “anybody else is better” issue that the JCS had with Obama’s policy.’ The Joint Chiefs felt that a direct challenge to Obama’s policy would have ‘had a zero chance of success’.

Ils vont alors tenter de contre-balancer celle-ci, sans rentrer en franche dissidence vis à vis de Washington, en faisant parvenir du renseignement par des canaux indirects (des militaires allemands, israéliens et russes) à Damas :

So in the autumn of 2013 they decided to take steps against the extremists without going through political channels, by providing US intelligence to the militaries of other nations, on the understanding that it would be passed on to the Syrian army and used against the common enemy, Jabhat al-Nusra and Islamic State.
Germany, Israel and Russia were in contact with the Syrian army, and able to exercise some influence over Assad’s decisions – it was through them that US intelligence would be shared. Each had its reasons for co-operating with Assad: Germany feared what might happen among its own population of six million Muslims if Islamic State expanded; Israel was concerned with border security; Russia had an alliance of very long standing with Syria, and was worried by the threat to its only naval base on the Mediterranean, at Tartus. ‘We weren’t intent on deviating from Obama’s stated policies,’ the adviser said. ‘But sharing our assessments via the military-to-military relationships with other countries could prove productive.

L’article se poursuit avec un paragraphe rappelant l’ambition partagée par l’administration G.W. Bush et Obama de renverser Assad depuis au moins 2003, avec les différentes actions entreprises, malgré une coopération sécuritaire de Damas appréciée par les cercles militaires et de renseignement américains (choses assez bien connues).
Ensuite Hersh balance une sacrée révélation : à partir de l’automne 2013, dans un contexte où l’effort financier turco-qataro-saoudien augmente et où l’ensemble de l’opération de déstabilisation d’Assad semble échapper aux Américains, ces militaires « dissidents » vont jouer un coup : en remplaçant la ligne d’approvisionnement principale libyenne des rebelles et des jihadistes en Syrie, par une ligne venue de Turquie, ils vont réussir à abaisser la qualité de l’armement obtenu par ceux-ci :

The CIA was approached by a representative from the Joint Chiefs with a suggestion: there were far less costly weapons available in Turkish arsenals that could reach the Syrian rebels within days, and without a boat ride.’ But it wasn’t only the CIA that benefited. ‘We worked with Turks we trusted who were not loyal to Erdoğan,’ the adviser said, ‘and got them to ship the jihadists in Syria all the obsolete weapons in the arsenal, including M1 carbines that hadn’t been seen since the Korean War and lots of Soviet arms. It was a message Assad could understand: “We have the power to diminish a presidential policy in its tracks.”’
The flow of US intelligence to the Syrian army, and the downgrading of the quality of the arms being supplied to the rebels, came at a critical juncture.

Par la suite en 2014, Brennan (directeur de la CIA) tente de reprendre la main dans ce maelström. Il réunit les chefs du renseignement des Etats « arabes sunnites » et leur demande de ne soutenir que l’opposition modérée. Il obtient un oui poli mais non suivi d’effet, tandis que la ligne générale de l’administration Obama reste la même :

Brennan’s message was ignored by the Saudis, the adviser said, who ‘went back home and increased their efforts with the extremists and asked us for more technical support. And we say OK, and so it turns out that we end up reinforcing the extremists.’

Et reste le problème des Turcs, moins faciles à manipuler, qui soutiennent à la fois al-Nusra et Da’ich :

But the Saudis were far from the only problem: American intelligence had accumulated intercept and human intelligence demonstrating that the Erdoğan government had been supporting Jabhat al-Nusra for years, and was now doing the same for Islamic State. ‘We can handle the Saudis,’ the adviser said. ‘We can handle the Muslim Brotherhood. You can argue that the whole balance in the Middle East is based on a form of mutually assured destruction between Israel and the rest of the Middle East, and Turkey can disrupt the balance – which is Erdoğan’s dream. We told him we wanted him to shut down the pipeline of foreign jihadists flowing into Turkey. But he is dreaming big – of restoring the Ottoman Empire – and he did not realise the extent to which he could be successful in this.’

Suit un long exposé, d’une part sur les relations américano-russes, que certains du côté de ces « dissidents » perçoivent comme trop marquées du côté de Washington par une mentalité anti-russe anachronique venue de la guerre froide, et sur les raisons de la peur de la Russie du phénomène jihadiste, amplifiée depuis la mort de Kadhafi, d’autre part. Evoqué aussi le traitement médiatique hostile aux USA à l’intervention russe en Syrie.
Reprise du récit. Après l’attentat de novembre dernier en France et le bombardier russe abattu par la chasse turque, Hollande tente d’amener Obama à un rapprochement avec la Russie mais sans succès, la ligne d’Obama restant départ d’Assad, opposition à l’intervention russe en Syrie, soutien à la Turquie, et maintien de l’idée d’une réelle opposiotn modérée :

The Paris attacks on 13 November that killed 130 people did not change the White House’s public stance, although many European leaders, including François Hollande, advocated greater co-operation with Russia and agreed to co-ordinate more closely with its air force; there was also talk of the need to be more flexible about the timing of Assad’s exit from power. On 24 November, Hollande flew to Washington to discuss how France and the US could collaborate more closely in the fight against Islamic State. At a joint press conference at the White House, Obama said he and Hollande had agreed that ‘Russia’s strikes against the moderate opposition only bolster the Assad regime, whose brutality has helped to fuel the rise’ of IS. Hollande didn’t go that far but he said that the diplomatic process in Vienna would ‘lead to Bashar al-Assad’s departure … a government of unity is required.’ The press conference failed to deal with the far more urgent impasse between the two men on the matter of Erdoğan. Obama defended Turkey’s right to defend its borders; Hollande said it was ‘a matter of urgency’ for Turkey to take action against terrorists. The JCS adviser told me that one of Hollande’s main goals in flying to Washington had been to try to persuade Obama to join the EU in a mutual declaration of war against Islamic State. Obama said no. The Europeans had pointedly not gone to Nato, to which Turkey belongs, for such a declaration. ‘Turkey is the problem,’ the JCS adviser said.

Hersh s’appuie ensuite sur l’ambassadeur syrien en Chine pour évoquer la cas de la Chine qui soutient aussi Assad. L’occasion de mentionner le Parti islamique du Turkestan Oriental, allié d’al-Qaïda et soutenu par les services turcs, et qui offre à des combattants notamment Ouïghours l’occasion de mener le jihad en Syrie avant peut-être de retourner le pratiquer dans le Xinjiang ce qui inquiète Pékin :

Moustapha also brought up China, an ally of Assad that has allegedly committed more than $30 billion to postwar reconstruction in Syria. China, too, is worried about Islamic State. ‘China regards the Syrian crisis from three perspectives,’ he said: international law and legitimacy; global strategic positioning; and the activities of jihadist Uighurs, from Xinjiang province in China’s far west. Xinjiang borders eight nations – Mongolia, Russia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Afghanistan, Pakistan and India – and, in China’s view, serves as a funnel for terrorism around the world and within China. Many Uighur fighters now in Syria are known to be members of the East Turkestan Islamic Movement – an often violent separatist organisation that seeks to establish an Islamist Uighur state in Xinjiang. ‘The fact that they have been aided by Turkish intelligence to move from China into Syria through Turkey has caused a tremendous amount of tension between the Chinese and Turkish intelligence,’ Moustapha said. ‘China is concerned that the Turkish role of supporting the Uighur fighters in Syria may be extended in the future to support Turkey’s agenda in Xinjiang.

L’article se finit sur le sort de ces « dissidents ». Flynn se fera virer en 2014, tandis que Dempsey et les autres au sein de l’état-major, qui ont été moins insistants, resteront en poste.

General Dempsey and his colleagues on the Joint Chiefs of Staff kept their dissent out of bureaucratic channels, and survived in office. General Michael Flynn did not. ‘Flynn incurred the wrath of the White House by insisting on telling the truth about Syria,’ said Patrick Lang, a retired army colonel who served for nearly a decade as the chief Middle East civilian intelligence officer for the DIA.

Dempsey finira par partir en retraite en 2015, mettant fin à cette « dissidence douce » au sein du Pentagone :

The military’s indirect pathway to Assad disappeared with Dempsey’s retirement in September. His replacement as chairman of the Joint Chiefs, General Joseph Dunford, testified before the Senate Armed Services Committee in July, two months before assuming office. ‘If you want to talk about a nation that could pose an existential threat to the United States, I’d have to point to Russia,’ Dunford said.

Conclusion :

Obama now has a more compliant Pentagon. There will be no more indirect challenges from the military leadership to his policy of disdain for Assad and support for Erdoğan. Dempsey and his associates remain mystified by Obama’s continued public defence of Erdoğan, given the American intelligence community’s strong case against him – and the evidence that Obama, in private, accepts that case. ‘We know what you’re doing with the radicals in Syria,’ the president told Erdoğan’s intelligence chief at a tense meeting at the White House (as I reported in the LRB of 17 April 2014). The Joint Chiefs and the DIA were constantly telling Washington’s leadership of the jihadist threat in Syria, and of Turkey’s support for it. The message was never listened to. Why not?

Le nouveau document de Seymour M. Hersh: Military to Military: US intelligence sharing in the Syrian war
►http://www.lrb.co.uk/v38/n01/seymour-m-hersh/military-to-military

The military’s resistance dates back to the summer of 2013, when a highly classified assessment, put together by the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) and the Joint Chiefs of Staff, then led by General Martin Dempsey, forecast that the fall of the Assad regime would lead to chaos and, potentially, to Syria’s takeover by jihadi extremists, much as was then happening in Libya. A former senior adviser to the Joint Chiefs told me that the document was an ‘all-source’ appraisal, drawing on information from signals, satellite and human intelligence, and took a dim view of the Obama administration’s insistence on continuing to finance and arm the so-called moderate rebel groups. By then, the CIA had been conspiring for more than a year with allies in the UK, Saudi Arabia and Qatar to ship guns and goods – to be used for the overthrow of Assad – from Libya, via Turkey, into Syria. The new intelligence estimate singled out Turkey as a major impediment to Obama’s Syria policy. The document showed, the adviser said, ‘that what was started as a covert US programme to arm and support the moderate rebels fighting Assad had been co-opted by Turkey, and had morphed into an across-the-board technical, arms and logistical programme for all of the opposition, including Jabhat al-Nusra and Islamic State. The so-called moderates had evaporated and the Free Syrian Army was a rump group stationed at an airbase in Turkey.’ The assessment was bleak: there was no viable ‘moderate’ opposition to Assad, and the US was arming extremists.

Lieutenant General Michael Flynn, director of the DIA between 2012 and 2014, confirmed that his agency had sent a constant stream of classified warnings to the civilian leadership about the dire consequences of toppling Assad. The jihadists, he said, were in control of the opposition. Turkey wasn’t doing enough to stop the smuggling of foreign fighters and weapons across the border. ‘If the American public saw the intelligence we were producing daily, at the most sensitive level, they would go ballistic,’ Flynn told me. ‘We understood Isis’s long-term strategy and its campaign plans, and we also discussed the fact that Turkey was looking the other way when it came to the growth of the Islamic State inside Syria.’ The DIA’s reporting, he said, ‘got enormous pushback’ from the Obama administration. ‘I felt that they did not want to hear the truth.’

‘Our policy of arming the opposition to Assad was unsuccessful and actually having a negative impact,’ the former JCS adviser said. ‘The Joint Chiefs believed that Assad should not be replaced by fundamentalists. The administration’s policy was contradictory. They wanted Assad to go but the opposition was dominated by extremists. So who was going to replace him? To say Assad’s got to go is fine, but if you follow that through – therefore anyone is better. It’s the “anybody else is better” issue that the JCS had with Obama’s policy.’ The Joint Chiefs felt that a direct challenge to Obama’s policy would have ‘had a zero chance of success’. So in the autumn of 2013 they decided to take steps against the extremists without going through political channels, by providing US intelligence to the militaries of other nations, on the understanding that it would be passed on to the Syrian army and used against the common enemy, Jabhat al-Nusra and Islamic State.

Germany, Israel and Russia were in contact with the Syrian army, and able to exercise some influence over Assad’s decisions – it was through them that US intelligence would be shared. Each had its reasons for co-operating with Assad: Germany feared what might happen among its own population of six million Muslims if Islamic State expanded; Israel was concerned with border security; Russia had an alliance of very long standing with Syria, and was worried by the threat to its only naval base on the Mediterranean, at Tartus. ‘We weren’t intent on deviating from Obama’s stated policies,’ the adviser said. ‘But sharing our assessments via the military-to-military relationships with other countries could prove productive. It was clear that Assad needed better tactical intelligence and operational advice. The JCS concluded that if those needs were met, the overall fight against Islamist terrorism would be enhanced. Obama didn’t know, but Obama doesn’t know what the JCS does in every circumstance and that’s true of all presidents.’

Once the flow of US intelligence began, Germany, Israel and Russia started passing on information about the whereabouts and intent of radical jihadist groups to the Syrian army; in return, Syria provided information about its own capabilities and intentions. There was no direct contact between the US and the Syrian military; instead, the adviser said, ‘we provided the information – including long-range analyses on Syria’s future put together by contractors or one of our war colleges – and these countries could do with it what they chose, including sharing it with Assad.

[…]

The military’s indirect pathway to Assad disappeared with Dempsey’s retirement in September. His replacement as chairman of the Joint Chiefs, General Joseph Dunford, testified before the Senate Armed Services Committee in July, two months before assuming office. ‘If you want to talk about a nation that could pose an existential threat to the United States, I’d have to point to Russia,’ Dunford said. ‘If you look at their behaviour, it’s nothing short of alarming.’ In October, as chairman, Dunford dismissed the Russian bombing efforts in Syria, telling the same committee that Russia ‘is not fighting’ IS. He added that America must ‘work with Turkish partners to secure the northern border of Syria’ and ‘do all we can to enable vetted Syrian opposition forces’ – i.e. the ‘moderates’ – to fight the extremists.

Obama now has a more compliant Pentagon. There will be no more indirect challenges from the military leadership to his policy of disdain for Assad and support for Erdoğan.