Washington impérial, — ou provincial?

John Brown est un ancien officier du Foreign Service, c’est-à-dire un fonctionnaire du département d’Etat formé à l'école diplomatique US. Il démissionna peu avant l’attaque de l’Irak, pour protester contre cette guerre. Depuis, il observe et commente la scène diplomatique de Washington, avec une précision critique extrêmement fine de la décadence de la diplomatie US.

Concernant la guerre en Irak et le comportement de certains des acteurs principaux autour de GW Bush, il écrit, mettant en évidence le caractère fondamentalement et pathétiquement dérisoire de cette aventure, malgré toutes les pompeuses explications qu'on s'empresse de lui donner: «Had Rice and Powell been capable of a global imperial vision – or even of grasping essential global cause and effect – they doubtless would have advised their president that his much-desired Mesopotamian (mis)adventure was bound to be a bloody, costly imperial mess. With certain down-to-earth military smarts, Powell may have sensed this, but evidently he lacked the nerve (or was it intellectual inclination?) to ask the simple questions at White House meetings that would have been the key to any imperial decision-making process: “Why exactly are we doing this?” “Is it really in our interests to invade a third-world country thousands of miles from our shores?” Or, put another way: “How does this invasion preserve or expand the American empire”?»

Dans ce texte que publie notamment le site TomDispatch.com de Tom Engelhardt, le 19 novembre, Brown développe sa critique d’une façon très réaliste, en prenant comme argument: certes, ils ont voulu établir l’Empire US, – admettons, pourquoi pas? Mais comment s’y sont-ils pris? Suit une critique incendiaire et très perspicace d’un establishment politique totalement incapable de sortir des limites de Washington D.C., totalement incapable de réaliser que le Rest Of the World, celui sur lequel justement on veut exercer son empire, existe et qu’il faut s’en préoccuper si l’on veut le conquérir. Brown nous peint un Washington D.C. qui se veut impérial et qui n’est que provincial, préoccupé de sa seule petite existence et de ses seuls petits affrontements internes, qui a transformé le pouvoir américaniste en une atomisation de divers centres d'intérêt, de pression, de divers petits pouvoirs concurrents acharnés, qui se déchirent.

Il s’agit certainement du travers fatal de Washington, cette incapacité de sortir de lui-même, cette ignorance pathologique du monde extérieur. On ne peut conquérir un monde dont non seulement on ignore l’existence, mais dont, finalement, on nie l’existence.

L’extrait ci-dessous, qui implique essentiellement Rumsfeld et Cheney, les concerne tous. Cette phrase, que Brown emprunte à Benjamin Barber, nous dit tout, finalement, de ce qu’il faut penser de cette énorme puissance si complètement dérisoire, ce mammouth qui rugissait comme une souris: «The United States remains a hegemonic global superpower sporting the narrow outlook of mini-states like Monaco and Lichtenstein.”»…

«For both Cheney and Rumsfeld, it was the imperial capital, not the empire itself that really mattered. There, “war” would mean the loosing of a commander-in-chief presidency unchecked by Congress, courts, anything – which meant power in the only world that mattered to them. War in the provinces was their ticket to renewed prominence within DC's self-absorbed biosphere, a kind of lost space station far removed from Mother Earth, and a place where they had longstanding, unfinished accounts – both personal and political -– to settle. “Foreign policy,” in other words, was an excuse for war in a far-off country that 63% of American youth between the ages of 18 and 24 could not, according to a National Geographic survey, find on a map of the Middle East. That, in turn, would make both the Vice President and Secretary of Defense (for a while) little Caesars in the only place that mattered, Washington, DC.

»If Saddam and assorted terrorists were enemies, they weren't the ones who really mattered. In the realest war of all, the one on the banks of the Potomac, Cheney and Rumsfeld were, above all, targeting those symbols of American internationalism that they had grown to despise in their previous Washington stays – the State Department and the CIA – perhaps because those organizations, at their best, aspired to see how the world looked at the United States, and not just how the United States could dismiss the world. Just as Bush “kicked ass” in Iraq, so Cheney and Rumsfeld used Iraq to “kick ass” among the striped-pants weenies at Foggy Bottom and the eggheads in the Intelligence Community. (Consider Cheney's treatment of Ambassador Joseph Wilson, who questioned the validity of the administration's claim about Saddam Hussein's search for uranium yellowcake in Niger in the late 1990s.) In toppling Iraq, the “imperial” aim of Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, their foreign policy “experts” and their acolytes was to raise the flag of their own power high above Washington, DC, while discrediting and humiliating those in the foreign-policy profession interested in the outside world for itself, those willing to consider how it related to actual U.S. national interests, not fantasy ones, and who therefore dared to question the goals and intentions of the dynamic duo.

»To see how Washington-centered this cast of characters actually was, just recall the Secretary of Defense's self-glorifying press conferences in his post-invasion heyday, when he played the strutting comedian. In that period, Rumsfeld, venerated by, among others, aging neocon Midge Decter in a swooning biography, was the king of the heap and visibly loving every second of it. Front-page headlines in the imperial capital were what counted, never the reality of Iraq – any more than it did when George W. Bush strutted that aircraft-carrier deck in his military get-up for his “mission accomplished” moment, launching (against a picturesque backdrop of sailors and war) Campaign 2004 at home. Poor Iraq. It was the butt of the imperial joke, as was – for a while – the rest of the outside world.

»Political theorist Benjamin Barber caught the Bush foreign-policy moment perfectly. The U.S., he wrote, made “foreign policy to indulge a host of domestic concerns and self-celebratory varieties of hide-bound insularity. The United States remains a hegemonic global superpower sporting the narrow outlook of mini-states like Monaco and Lichtenstein.”

»In the end, the Bush administration is likely to be remembered not for a failed imperialism, but a failed parochialism, an inability to perceive a world beyond the Washington of Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld, beyond George W. Bush's national security “homeland.” That may be the President's ultimate legacy.»

Mis en ligne le 20 novembre 2007 à 10H32