Sa putain de guerre

Voilà l'objet du scandale, l'article de Rolling Stone, The Runaway General. Il y a tout d'abord les attaques contre le général en chambre Barack Obama :

Even though he had voted for Obama, McChrystal and his new commander in chief failed from the outset to connect. The general first encountered Obama a week after he took office, when the president met with a dozen senior military officials in a room at the Pentagon known as the Tank. According to sources familiar with the meeting, McChrystal thought Obama looked "uncomfortable and intimidated" by the roomful of military brass. Their first one-on-one meeting took place in the Oval Office four months later, after McChrystal got the Afghanistan job, and it didn't go much better. "It was a 10-minute photo op," says an adviser to McChrystal. "Obama clearly didn't know anything about him, who he was. Here's the guy who's going to run his fucking war, but he didn't seem very engaged. The Boss was pretty disappointed."

Mais les psychodrames washingtoniens, même s'ils sont quand même d'une tout autre dimension que ceux de nos tapeurs de ballons (on a les crises de nerf qu'on mérite) nous concernent en ce que le Domenech de l'Elysée nous a embarqués dans ce que le Pentagone admet ouvertement être un nouveau Vietnam :

Today, as McChrystal gears up for an offensive in southern Afghanistan, the prospects for any kind of success look bleak. In June, the death toll for U.S. troops passed 1,000, and the number of IEDs has doubled. Spending hundreds of billions of dollars on the fifth-poorest country on earth has failed to win over the civilian population, whose attitude toward U.S. troops ranges from intensely wary to openly hostile. The biggest military operation of the year – a ferocious offensive that began in February to retake the southern town of Marja – continues to drag on, prompting McChrystal himself to refer to it as a "bleeding ulcer." In June, Afghanistan officially outpaced Vietnam as the longest war in American history – and Obama has quietly begun to back away from the deadline he set for withdrawing U.S. troops in July of next year. The president finds himself stuck in something even more insane than a quagmire: a quagmire he knowingly walked into, even though it's precisely the kind of gigantic, mind-numbing, multigenerational nation-building project he explicitly said he didn't want.

Even those who support McChrystal and his strategy of counterinsurgency know that whatever the general manages to accomplish in Afghanistan, it's going to look more like Vietnam than Desert Storm. "It's not going to look like a win, smell like a win or taste like a win," says Maj. Gen. Bill Mayville, who serves as chief of operations for McChrystal. "This is going to end in an argument.

Vive la COunterINsurgency ! s'extasiaient il n'y a pas si longtemps, allez, pas plus tard que la semaine dernière, nos consultants et experts sur les plateaux télé. McChrystal nouveau Lyautey ! titrait il y a six mois Le Figaro. Comme quoi, d'une débâcle l'autre, on a les Gamelins qu'on mérite, et surtout les Paul Reynaud qu'on a élus, de part de d'autre de l'Atlantique.

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