Plus ça change…

Croyez-vous que les choses soient si différentes avec GW Bush ? Croyez-vous que cet avorton soit, à lui seul, cause de tout ? Il faut croire bigrement à l’American Dream pour croire cela. Le bon, l’excellent James Carroll nous le rappelle dans un article où il célèbre non sans tristesse le soixantième anniversaire de la “doctrine Truman”.

Tant de bons esprits opposent l’excellent Harry Truman (et quelques autres du même acabit) à l’exécrable GW pour nous annoncer que toute notre amertume nous passera avec le départ du second, que nous pourrons enfin à loisir retourner à l’arrosage de nos illusions. Laissez les Pravda diverses, qu’elles soient du “temps de New York” ou de la “poste de Washington” et attardez-vous à Carroll :

«More than adjustments in tactics and strategy are needed. What must be criticized, and even dismantled, is nothing less than the national security state that Truman inaugurated on this date in 1947. The habits of mind that defined American attitudes during the Cold War still provide consoling and profitable structures of meaning, even as dread of communism has been replaced by fear of terrorism. Thus, Truman's “every nation must choose” became Bush's “You are with us or against us.” America's political paranoia still projects its worst fears onto the enemy, paradoxically strengthening its most paranoid elements. The monstrous dynamic feeds itself.

»The United States has obviously, and accidentally, been reinforcing the most belligerent elements in Iran and North Korea, but it is also doing so in Russia and China. Last week, for example, alarms went off in Washington with the news that China is increasing its military spending by nearly 18 percent this year, bringing its officially acknowledged military budget to $45 billion. Yet who was raising questions about massive American military sales (including missiles) to Taiwan, whose defense build up stimulates Beijing's? Speaking of budgets, who questions the recently unveiled Pentagon total for 2008 of more than $620 billion? (Under Bill Clinton, the defense budget went from $260 billion to about $300 billion.) Even allowing for Iraq and Afghanistan, how can such an astronomical figure be justified?

»When the United States announces plans to station elements of its missile defense system in Poland and the Czech Republic, why are Russian complaints dismissed as evidence of Vladimir Putin's megalomania? On this date in 1999, Poland, Hungary, and the Czech Republic were admitted to NATO, in violation of American assurances to Moscow that NATO would not move east from the unified Germany. Now NATO looks further east still, toward Georgia and Ukraine. And Putin is the paranoid?»

Mis en ligne le 15 mars 2007 à 13H49