Le roi lit…

GW est parti en vacances dans son ranch du Texas avec deux bouquins dans sa besace. On entend tourner les pages d’ici.

GW est un homme limpide comme le cristal. Si l’on sait ce qu’il lit, on sait ce qu’il fera. Jim Lobe nous explique la chose. « Indeed, Bush is known to read so little – both for official business and for diversion – and to be so impressed by the few books he does read that it is imperative for people who are paid to know what's happening in Washington to find out what's on the president's nightstand when he turns out the light. »

Alors, les deux bouquins? When Trumpets Call: Theodore Roosevelt After the White House et Grunts: The American Military on the Ground. Le premier semble assez inoffensif. Il serait même assez rassurant, toujours selon Lobe, puisqu’il nous indiquerait ce que GW compte faire de son après-présidence. Cela paraît signifier qu’il y a quelque chose après George W. Bush, que nous continuerons à exister malgré son départ. « The choice may suggest that Bush, who clearly subscribes to the "great man" theory of history that was the rage in Roosevelt's time, is contemplating a very active retirement. If it doesn't take him on safari in Africa or on scientific expeditions to the Amazon (unlikely pastimes for a man who by all accounts is an unenthusiastic and incurious traveler), it could make him a permanent force in the Republican Party and for the kind of aggressive nationalism that Roosevelt espoused through much of his career. »

Le second est plus inquiétant pour le reste de la présidence. Il est de Robert Kaplan, un dur de dur. Un aventurier devenu penseur et inspirateur, tendance néo-conservatrice. « The second book […] is far more worrisome in its implications, at least for the remaining three years of his presidency. Kaplan, who began his career as a self-described "travel writer" in the 1980s, has evolved into a political thinker whose outlook is explicitly imperialist – a term that he has used and reused in recent years with unabashed approval – and, in the words of one conservative reviewer and retired Army colonel, Andrew Bacevich, "reactionary."

» In his view (and one that would be shockingly familiar to Roosevelt in his "Rough Riding" days in Cuba more than 100 years ago), the "war on terror" and associated conflicts is simply a repeat of the U.S. Army's Indian Wars, but on a nearly planetary scale.

» Instead of the Great Plains and western reaches of the 19th century U.S., however, today's "Injun Country," as Kaplan calls it, consists of the entire Islamic world, from the southern Philippines to Mauritania, as well as other ungoverned or misgoverned areas in desperate need of order and civilization.

» And who best to civilize these places and their inhabitants than the U.S. military, specifically the "imperial grunts" with whom Kaplan embedded himself – no doubt with the enthusiastic support of the Pentagon and probably Rumsfeld himself – for weeks at a time in various parts of the world on three continents, and who, not incidentally, bear a striking resemblance to Bush's own self-image? »

Mis en ligne le 30 décembre 2005 à 07H33