Le moment de vérité approche

Le moment de vérité approche

On connaît bien James Carroll, souvent cité dans ces colonnes, homme assez rare dans les quartiers sympathiques de la dissidence anti-américaniste en Amérique même. On prêtera l’attention qu’il faut à son dernier éditorial du 22 juin 2010, dans le Boston Globe, surmonté de la photo cruelle d’un général Petraeus au visage juvénile et comme “lifté”, et pourtant hagard, à bout de souffle, comme perdu dans un désarroi inexplicable, – photo lors de son malaise lors d’une audition du Congrès.

Carroll trace un parallèle qui devient presque une exigence, entre la déroute en Afghanistan et la catastrophe dans le Golfe Persique, avec des auditions là-dessus le même jour : «The two Washington hearings captured the widespread American mood of exhaustion and dread. The nation has been drastically confronted with its impotence on multiple fronts…»

Sa conclusion, qui nous dit que l’Amérique atteint son heure de vérité, que les mois qui viennent, les semaines qui viennent, la font déjà résonner… «On the verge of collapse».

«…At issue is nothing less than the inbred sense of American goodness — a faith on which President Obama himself depended when he first backed both Petraeus, embracing the war, and the self-same oil executives, authorizing expanded off-shore drilling. The president has halted the latter, and must regret the former — but too late in both instances. When a core enterprise of the US economy shows itself, as in the Gulf, to be wantonly destructive, with every citizen complicit in that destruction; when the grief of America’s misbegotten adventures in Iraq and Afghanistan is thwarted by an unending fainting spell of leadership at all levels — the nation’s trust in itself can be irretrievably lost.

»Obama is like a rock climber in trouble on a sheer face, extended beyond himself, no ascending hand-hold in sight. But from the Gulf of Mexico to the Persian Gulf, the environmental and military crises overlap to create an urgency which itself defines the next move. Obama must engender a new American consensus. The public debates are familiar enough — energy policy, troop withdrawal timetables — but the context within which they will reach crescendo is unprecedented. Washington pols cavil as ever, oil execs gush the usual denial, and the military brass equivocates on. But the nation itself is in a profoundly different place than last winter, that fickle season of political hope. This summer the American character will show itself for what it has become. So, too, the American president. Now, actually, Barack Obama’s presidency begins. Fainting is not an option.»

dedefensa.org