Les folies de la guerre victorieuse (I): le facteur GW

Contrairement à ce que nous avions annoncé, et ce que tout le monde avait annoncé y compris le porte-parole de la Maison-Blanche, il semble bien que la “fin de la guerre” par la victoire dans six mois ne soit pas nécessairement pour demain (pour dans six mois). GW continue à affirmer qu’il lui faut la victoire totale, comme dans son discours annoncé pour aujourd’hui et il exclut un départ sans une victoire totale sur le terrain. Pour GW, “victoire” signifie vraiment “victoire”. (Tout cela semble-t-il confus et contradictoire à nos lecteurs? A nous aussi. Nous faisons la chronique d’un temps historique fou.)

Un excellent article de Seymour Hersch, dans The New Yorker en date du 5 décembre nous donne quelques indications sur l’état d’esprit de GW, — état d’esprit de toujours, état d’esprit d’aujourd’hui et des six prochains mois après tout, — pourquoi voudrait-on qu’il changeât ce que Dieu lui suggère?

« “We’re not planning to diminish the war,” Patrick Clawson, the deputy director of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, told me. Clawson’s views often mirror the thinking of the men and women around Vice-President Dick Cheney and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. (...) “We want to draw down our forces, but the President is prepared to tough this one out. There is a very deep feeling on his part that the issue of Iraq was settled by the American people at the polling places in 2004.” The war against the insurgency “may end up being a nasty and murderous civil war in Iraq, but we and our allies would still win,” he said. “As long as the Kurds and the Shiites stay on our side, we’re set to go. There’s no sense that the world is caving in. We’re in the middle of a seven-year slog in Iraq, and eighty per cent of the Iraqis are receptive to our message.”

» One Pentagon adviser told me, “There are always contingency plans, but why withdraw and take a chance? I don’t think the President will go for it”—until the insurgency is broken. “He’s not going to back off. This is bigger than domestic politics.”

» Current and former military and intelligence officials have told me that the President remains convinced that it is his personal mission to bring democracy to Iraq, and that he is impervious to political pressure, even from fellow Republicans. They also say that he disparages any information that conflicts with his view of how the war is proceeding.

» Bush’s closest advisers have long been aware of the religious nature of his policy commitments. In recent interviews, one former senior official, who served in Bush’s first term, spoke extensively about the connection between the President’s religious faith and his view of the war in Iraq. After the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, the former official said, he was told that Bush felt that “God put me here” to deal with the war on terror. The President’s belief was fortified by the Republican sweep in the 2002 congressional elections; Bush saw the victory as a purposeful message from God that “he’s the man,” the former official said. Publicly, Bush depicted his reëlection as a referendum on the war; privately, he spoke of it as another manifestation of divine purpose.

» The former senior official said that after the election he made a lengthy inspection visit to Iraq and reported his findings to Bush in the White House: “I said to the President, ‘We’re not winning the war.’ And he asked, ‘Are we losing?’ I said, ‘Not yet.’ ” The President, he said, “appeared displeased” with that answer. “I tried to tell him,” the former senior official said. “And he couldn’t hear it.” »

Mis en ligne le 30 novembre à 13H42