Le vigoureux jugement de Tariq Ali

Effectivement, l’“image” de Tony Blair est définitivement colorée par l’aventure irakienne. A côté des jugements des historiens qui renforcent pourtant cette idée, il y a des appréciations plus polémiques. Celle de Tariq Ali, ancien leader étudiant extrémiste des années 1960 et critique constant de la politique expansionniste et belliciste anglo-saxonne, est polémique et vigoureuse. Le fait est qu’elle nous semble également se rapprocher le plus de la réalité.

Peut-être est-ce là le drame de Tony Blair. Il voulait, il devait être un personnage consensuel, comme le peignait effectivement son service de communication. (Comme il l’est encore en France, qui est sans doute le dernier pays où les élites croient encore au mythe de Tony Blair.) En fait, il s’avéra qu’il était un personnage polémique, engagé dans des politiques extrémistes. Il n’a jamais eu vraiment d’argument pour soutenir cette position, sinon l’affirmation stupidement sentimentale, qui en dit long sur sa lucidité critique, qu’il a répétée dans son discours d’hier où il annonce sa démission, — car il n’avait pas de mauvaises intentions, ce qui est sans aucun doute le pire des aveux : «Hand on heart, I did what I thought was right. I may have been wrong. That's your call. But believe one thing if nothing else. I did what I thought was right for our country.»

Par conséquent, la diatribe de Tariq Ali est effectivement ce qui se rapproche le plus d’une description juste de Tony Blair. (Dans le Guardian d’aujourd’hui.)

»Tony Blair's principal success was in winning three general elections in a row. A second-rate actor, he turned out to be a crafty and avaricious politician. Bereft of ideas, he eagerly grasped and tried to improve on Margaret Thatcher's legacy. But though in many ways Blair's programme has been a euphemistic, if bloodier, version of Thatcher's, the style of their departures is very different. Thatcher's overthrow by her fellow Conservatives was a matter of high drama. Blair makes his unwilling exit against a backdrop of car bombs and carnage in Iraq, with hundreds of thousands left dead or maimed from his policies, and London a prime target for terrorist attack. Thatcher's supporters described themselves afterwards as horror-struck by what they had done. Even some of Blair's greatest sycophants in the media confess to a sense of relief as he finally quits.

(…)

»If this judgment seems unduly harsh, let me quote Rodric Braithwaite, a former senior adviser to Blair, writing in the Financial Times on August 2 2006: “A spectre is stalking British television, a frayed and waxy zombie straight from Madame Tussaud's. This one, unusually, seems to live and breathe. Perhaps it comes from the CIA's box of technical tricks, programmed to spout the language of the White House in an artificial English accent ... Mr Blair has done more damage to British interests in the Middle East than Anthony Eden, who led the UK to disaster in Suez 50 years ago. In the past 100 years we have bombed and occupied Egypt and Iraq, put down an Arab uprising in Palestine and overthrown governments in Iran, Iraq and the Gulf. We can no longer do these things on our own, so we do them with the Americans. Mr Blair's total identification with the White House has destroyed his influence in Washington, Europe and the Middle East itself: who bothers with the monkey if he can go straight to the organ-grinder?”

»This, too, is mild compared to what is privately said in the Foreign Office and MoD. Senior diplomats have told me it would not upset them too much if Blair were tried as a war criminal. But while neither Blair nor any of those who launched a war of aggression and occupation in Iraq have been held to account, a civil servant and MP's researcher were yesterday shamefully jailed for exposing some of the dealings between Bush and Blair that lay behind the war.»

Mis en ligne le 11 mai 2007 à 06H22