Nous, vous bombarder “back to the Stone Age”? Mais ce n'est pas notre genre!

GW a été, paraît-il, choqué, peiné et même furieux d’apprendre, en lisant la presse, qu’“on” (Richard Armitage) avait menacé de bombarder le Pakistan, un si vieil ami. Car c’est bien en lisant la presse que GW a appris l’affreuse nouvelle : « President Bush said he was “taken aback” when he read the claim in this morning's newspapers.» (Nouvelle pour nous aussi : on en était resté à l’idée que GW Bush ne lisait pas la presse, se jugeant suffisamment informé par les JT et les mémos que lui envoient les divers services habilités à ce genre de sport.)

Washington est singulièrement contrit des révélations de son ami, le général Musharraf, du Pakistan, concernant les menaces proférées par Richard Armitage «to bomb his country “back into the Stone Age”». (Armitage, entre-temps, a d’abord confirmé qu’il avait bien menacé le Pakistan sous une forme ou une autre, mais qu’il n’avait pas garanti qu’on ramènerait le pays à l’Âge de pierre. Puis sa version s’est encore édulcorée.)

Bref, Washington a diablement paniqué devant la sortie de Musharraf. Washington n’a plus aujourd’hui beaucoup d’alliés et, s’il lui reste des bombardiers valides, il n’a plus sa superbe militaire de septembre 2001. D’où cet exercice de haute voltige de démenti patelin et amical de toutes les façons.

Le Times, déjà cité plus haut, nous donne quelques indications sur cet aspect de la polémique :

«Later, when asked about General Musharraf's comment during a joint press conference with the Pakistani President, Mr Bush said he knew nothing of the alleged threat and that Pakistan had been one of America's earliest and closest allies in the war in Afghanistan.

»“The first I heard of this was when I read it in the newspaper today and I was taken aback by the harshness of the words,” he said, referring to the controversy as “the Armitage thing”.

»Mr Armitage has also denied General Musharraf's claim, although when asked what the former Deputy Secretary of State might have said, Mr Snow said today: “I don’t know. This could have been a classic failure to communicate. I just don’t know.”

»Documents showed that Mr Armitage met the Pakistani Ambassador and the visiting head of Pakistan’s military intelligence service in Washington on September 13, 2001. Mr Armitage, who has admitted being the source in the CIA leak inquiry, left office in 2005.

»General Musharraf made the allegation in an interview with CBS television last night which is due to be broadcast in America on Sunday. “The intelligence director told me that [Armitage] said, ‘Be prepared to be bombed. Be prepared to go back to the Stone Age’,” he told CBS's ‘60 Minutes’ programme. “I think it was a very rude remark.”

»Today General Musharraf declined to comment on the remark, saying, to laughter from the press corps, that he was bound to silence by his contract with Simon and Schuster, the publishing house. The President's memoir, In the Line of Fire, is published next week and will be serialised in The Times from Monday.»

Mis en ligne le 23 septembre 2006 à 08H59