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Between the Battle of Port-Arthur, concluded during the frigid year 1905, and that of Fallujah, the end of which has not really been written, a century. A long century, and few points in common between the two events, given that war seems to have changed even more quickly than the societies it shoves around. Nonetheless, these two military episodes both created and symbolized a profound strategic rupture. Port-Arthur was the first Western defeat in the face of an adversary from another world - in that case, Asia - in a modern war. Fallujah and the thousand and one fronts of the Iraqi quagmire represent the first Western failure in these famous postmodern wars. In both cases, the consequences are immense and include the inscription within people's unconscious of a new vision of power relationships. Today, from Beirut to Kabul, by way of Baghdad, everyone knows that Western power may be, if not vanquished, at the very least circumvented.
In three years, everything has changed. The Cold War had crowned a sole victor, and in almost all "sectors of the game": political, economic, and military. Washington's militarized diplomacy seemed to be able to gain the upper hand over everything. The laser-guided bomb had become the new paradigm for the art of war. The Gulf War, the slap at Milosevic in the Balkans - once it was decided to give it to him, the rapid eviction of the Taliban from Afghanistan after September 11, and the short Iraq campaign of 2003 provided dazzling demonstrations to that effect. And then came the war after the war, in Mesopotamia as in the Hindu Kush. And, as a nasty reflection, the latest painful adventure of the Israeli army in southern Lebanon. Hassan Nasrallah is hardly engaging in empty talk when he deems that there is a before and an after the summer of 2006. In several months and as many battles, the American hyperpower and its "ally" lost an immense share of their deterrent credibility. Of course, the military and technological superiority of the American Army and of those enrolled in its wake remains incontrovertible, and will for a long time. But on a purely technical level, that superiority is tending to dwindle. And, above all, to prove itself ineffective - or worse, counter-productive - in today's combat.
How did we get to this pass? First of all, the opponent has adapted, has made his own military revolution. And Hezbollah appears today as the model of this "transformation" - to use the Pentagon's key word - of the informal military actor. Its methods, moreover, are being imitated from Baghdad to Kandahar. And, in South Lebanon as in Iraq, one now finds weapons of the latest generation, notably anti-tank weapons. This elevation of the qualitative level of the "rebels'" materiel depends on two factors. One is the benevolent godfathering of two countries, Iran and Syria. And, upstream from there, on the new progress in the Russian armaments industry after the regime's decline during the 1990s that allows the technological gap to be bridged, and for a return to the more balanced position of the 1970s. By a ricochet effect, the protection of their forces has become the great priority for Western armies. Improvised explosive devices (IEDs) are the principle cause of losses today in all the different Western theaters of operation. With artisanal devices, detonated with ever more skillful techniques, simple guerrillas draw the great powers into vertiginous military expenditures. The Joint Defeat Organization (JIEDDO), the American organization charged with countering the threat, has seen its budget take off in an unbelievable way: 3.4 billion dollars in 2006, or more than the Manhattan Project spent to produce atomic weapons.... A financial escalation that quickly risks becoming paralyzing.
The second reason derives from the difficult adaptation of Western armies. Technical progress has considerably enhanced the means for rapid, precise, and long-distance destruction. But, paradoxically, by giving the illusion of the prompt dispersal of threats in the first phase of combat, these same means have sometimes prevented threat assessment over the longer term. In Iraq, in Afghanistan, those threats reconstituted themselves in the second phase that no one any longer dares call "stabilization." By compromising the "conquest of hearts," the excessive and sometimes indiscriminate use of force then becomes counter-productive, as the British army's head recently acknowledged. More broadly, we revert here to the question of the political framework of these - military - interventions. De facto, a system of "half-mandates" has been established. America in Iraq, NATO in Afghanistan occupy without controlling, without having the means of developing, of perpetuating the initial security action. They prick at sovereignty, without bringing stability. Wonky formulas that can only arouse rejection in the end, as we see. Consequently, if the tactical and material asymmetry of conflicts tends to diminish, the moral asymmetry accrues. The Pashtun rebel and the Sunni combatant have a greater "will" to win than the Western soldier opposed to them. They also have time, unlike democracies avid for rapid victories.
Consequently, the strategic equation is disrupted from every direction: on the unconventional level, by the anchorage of an extreme and globalized terrorism; on the conventional level by the Calvary of Western forces in Iraq and in Afghanistan as well as the bitter disappointment of the IDF against Hezbollah; on the strategic level, finally, with the probable intrusion in coming years of new actors in the nuclear club.
And, above all, in the era of hyperinformation, Westerners are discovering that there is a position almost worse than defeat: non-victory.
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