“Non, rien de rien…”, il ne regrette rien

Tony Blair n’est pas un “poodle” (un caniche), comme on l’accuse d’être vis-à-vis des USA. Tony Blair n’est pas un pro-américaniste servile. Cet homme a cru, il croit et il croira, et son alliance avec l’Amérique fut une alliance entre croisés postmodernes où la foi commune écarte toute idée de calcul et de servilité. Sur les écrans où d’aventure on brancherait la BBC, on verra une série consacré aux “Années Blair” (The Blair Years, premier épisode sur BBC-1, dimanche à 22H15). L’on sera convaincu de cette psychologie de Tony Blair.

Le Times a recueilli les “bonnes paroles”, comme on dit les “bonnes feuilles”, de ces émissions au travers d’un entretien avec Tony Blair. Il commente cet entretien dans un court éditorial publié aujourd’hui où il nous confirme que Blair ne fut pas un manœuvrier, qu’il ne fut pas dans cette aventure pour tenter de contenir la furia de Washington, qu’il ne “suivit” pas Bush comme un caniche, – mais au contraire, qu’il fut absolument un “croyant” dans cette guerre et qu’il reste un croyant.

«In frank remarks in a BBC documentary, Mr Blair confirmed openly the belief of many of his closest supporters that he never used his position as America’s strongest ally to try to force Mr Bush down the diplomatic rather than the military route.

»It was never a “bargaining chip” for him and he was never looking for a way out, he told David Aaronovitch, of The Times, in interviews for The Blair Years. “It was what I believed in, and I still do believe it,” he said.»

L’entretien fait l’objet d’un long texte, également aujourd’hui dans le Times. Blair s’y montre tel qu’en lui-même. C’est un pur produit de la civilisation moderniste qui a abandonné la culture politique pour l’idéologie. Quoi qu’on puisse dire de lui à propos de ses capacités de manœuvrier politique, l’aspect le plus fondamental de Blair est qu’il est venu à la politique par l’utopie idéologique et qu’il n’a jamais quitté ce domaine. Sa “foi”, sa “croyance” se sont greffées dessus pour animer sa volonté et son actions politiques. Ce n’est pas la “foi” de Blair qui est en cause mais l’objet de cette “foi”, c’est-à-dire l’utopie idéologique, et l'hystérie qui habite sa psychologie en conséquence du choix de cette utopie (ou bien est-ce sa psychologie qui le conduisit à épouser l'utopie). Sa complète ignorance des affaires de politique extérieure à ses débuts de dirigeant politique (comme pour Margaret Thatcher, note le Times, ce qui nous en dit long) a fait le reste et l’a conduit à être l’homme de l’Irak.

Blair est la démonstration de la catastrophe politique et psychologique que constitue l’irruption de la morale utopique comme élément fondamental de la politique. L’inculture est une condition essentielle de cette situation. En fait de culture politique, cet homme n’eut que sa passion exacerbée et une foi passé au tamis de cette passion, avec la communication devenue virtualisme pour faire prendre la mayonnaise. Blair est l’archétype de l’homme politique moderniste, essentiellement anglo-saxon, c’est-à-dire sans la culture et la tradition politique qu’eurent la plupart de ses devanciers. (Quoi qu’on dise, effectivement il est proche de Winston Churchill par l’aspect de cette passion exacerbée, qui réduit l’expérience et la connaissance à des outils de propagande au service de la cause que ce trait psychologique vous a conduit à choidir.)

Quelques extraits du long article sur Tony Blair.

• Ses débuts dans la grande politique internationale.

«When Tony Blair became Leader of the Opposition in 1994, he — like Margaret Thatcher — knew little about foreign policy. What he did have was a series of instincts about how the Major Government and the international community had handled affairs in Bosnia, and he wasn’t impressed. Ever the anti-fatalist, once in office he was inclined to see such problems as requiring a solution. And passing across his desk in autumn 1997 were a series of intelligence reports concerning the dictator of Iraq, Saddam Hussein, and his weapons of mass destruction. “We cannot let him get away with it,” he told Paddy Ashdown that November.

»Although military force short of invasion was used several times against Iraq in the following years, the first killing ground was to be the Serbian province of Kosovo in 1999. When a campaign of airstrikes against Milosevic’s Serbia seemed to be getting nowhere, Blair began to agitate for Nato to threaten the use of ground troops and eventually persuaded a very reluctant Bill Clinton to agree to such a line. Two days later Milosevic backed down. The lesson that Blair took from this, he told me, was that the credible and united threat to use force could succeed where all else failed. In fact he didn’t believe that Clinton would have carried out the threat.

»As the Kosovo crisis developed, Blair had delivered a major foreign policy speech in Chicago that spring. This address outlined a doctrine of liberal interventionism, arguing that there were circumstances when, though its interests were not directly threatened, the international community might intervene in the domestic affairs of sovereign states. The speech singled out two major villains: Milosevic and Saddam. One critic of Blair’s foreign policy activism was — I was reminded by a senior Blair aide — then an academic at Stamford, Condoleezza Rice.»

• La fin de l’article, la péroraison si l’on veut. L’homme nous dit les choses les plus importantes quant à sa position, notamment le fait qu’il n’envisagea jamais vraiment de réfréner GW Bush, parce qu’en vérité il partageait complètement son irrésistible volonté de partir en guerre contre Saddam Hussein. Effectivement, chez les deux hommes il s’agissait d’une foi mise au service d’une vision utopique exacerbée. Bien entendu, Blair y croit toujours mais il pense que, malheureusement, nous n’avons pas la foi de cette génération habitée (GW et lui-même) qui s’efface et, par conséquent, que nous risquons de perdre la plus grande bataille de tous les temps. A côté de Blair, les croisés des XIème et XIIème siècles font figure d’âmes tièdes.

«Bush had phoned Blair two days earlier to tell him that Britain could stand aside if it meant saving Blair’s premiership. “I said rather than lose your Government,” Bush told me, “be passive, you know we’ll go without you if need be.” Blair refused. I asked him why. His answer was impassioned. “Because I think this is the most fundamental struggle of our time and there is only one place to be which is in the thick of it and trying to sort it out.” Some, including Colin Powell, have subsequently criticised Blair for never really facing Bush down. I put Powell’s words to Blair. “It wasn’t a bargaining chip for me,” he replied. “I wasn’t in a position where I was negotiating with him (Bush) in order to get him to do something different. In my view if it wasn’t clear that the whole nature of the way Saddam was dealing with this issue had changed I was in favour of military action. And, I am afraid, in one sense it is worse than people think in so far as my position is concerned. I believed in it. I believed in it then, I believe in it now.” But did he feel remorse about a war and an occupation that left 4,000 Americans dead, 150 British dead, 75,000 Iraqis dead by the most conservative estimate and more than 3 million refugees?

»“There’d be something wrong with me if I didn’t, or an acute sense of responsibility which I . . . will have for the rest of my life,” Blair said. “But I can’t say what I don’t believe about this; whatever it began as, it is part of this wider struggle today and . . . if there’s anything I regret. . . it is . . . not having laid out for people in a clearer way what I saw as the profound nature of this struggle and the fact that it was going to go on for a generation.”

»And for once his conclusion was, very uncharacteristically, gloomy. “The enemy that we are fighting I am afraid has learnt . . . that our stomach for this fight is limited and I believe they think they can wait us out. Our determination has got to match theirs and our will has got to be stronger than theirs and at the moment I think it is probably not.”»

• Pour terminer, on notera dans ce passage tout le mépris de l’utopie idéologique qui a asservi la foi et écarté la raison, pour ceux qui ne parviennent pas à écarter toute référence à la raison. Bien entendu, il s’agit des Français et de Chirac en particulier, ce “poor old Jacques”…

»There was still hope. That November [2002], in the peak moment for Blair’s strategy, the Security Council passed Resolution 1441 demanding Saddam’s readmission of weapons inspectors and a regime of compliance. But it was clear very early that France, at any rate, had a different idea of what action 1441 entailed.Chirac was partly animated by a contempt for George Bush and partly by the fear of a Shia Iraq and a civil war. Sir Stephen Wall recalls that after meetings with Chirac, Tony “would kind of roll his eyes and say, poor old Jacques, he doesn’t get it, does he?”»

Mis en ligne le 17 novembre 2007 à 09H12