If John Kerry wins the US presidency, he will find himself in the same plight as Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon when they took office. Each inherited another man’s war. Each prosecuted that war, Johnson reluctantly, Nixon because he thought he could do better. Both failed and were destroyed by the war.<\/em> \u00bb<\/p>\n<\/p>\n\tMieux encore : Pfaff met justement en \u00e9vidence combien John Kerry se trompe, combien il est, par exemple par rapport \u00e0 Johnson qui savait \u00e0 quoi s’en tenir \u00e0 propos du Viet-n\u00e2m, compl\u00e8tement dans l’illusion \u00e0 propos de l’Irak.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
\t\u00ab Johnson <\/em>() told his press secretary, Bill Moyers: ‘I feel like a hitchhiker caught in a hailstorm on a Texas highway. I can’t run. I can’t hide. And I can’t make it stop.’<\/em> <\/p>\n<\/p>\n\t\u00bb The murdered Kennedy’s foreign policy advisers told him that if he didn’t press on with the war, ‘Asian communism’ would conquer one non-Western state after another – dominos tumbling. So did practically everyone else in the Washington policy community. It was one of those things ‘everybody knew’.<\/em> <\/p>\n<\/p>\n\t\u00bb Johnson was a populist economic and racial-justice reformer. He knew nothing of south-east Asia. He knew that if he prosecuted the war, he ‘would lose everything at home’. If he did not, he ‘would be seen as a coward and my nation would be seen as an appeaser, and we would both find it impossible to accomplish anything for anybody anywhere’. Kerry expresses no such doubts. He apparently accepts what ‘everyone knows’ in Washington today, as in London, that ‘failure in Iraq is not an option’.<\/em> <\/p>\n<\/p>\n\t\u00bb This is true. Failure is no longer an option because it has already been assured by choices already made by the Bush administration. The questions that remain are failure’s timing and the gravity of its consequences.<\/em> \u00bb<\/p>\n<\/p>\n\tLa similitude des \u00e9tats d’esprit, des erreurs en cours, des distorsions des psychologies, du refus de l’exp\u00e9rience des faits, du conformisme d\u00e9vastateur, est particuli\u00e8rement bien mise en \u00e9vidence. On notera simplement, mais ce n’est certes pas rien, que la situation est aujourd’hui bien plus grave pour les Etats-Unis, et que l’\u00e9chec probable de Kerry, s’il est \u00e9lu, \u00e0 d\u00e9sengager l’Am\u00e9rique de l’Irak r\u00e9serve \u00e0 son pays des \u00e9preuves difficiles.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
\tLa vision d’historien que nous montre Pfaff est bien en ce qu’il comprend parfaitement o\u00f9 se situe la seule porte de sortie pour l’Am\u00e9rique aujourd’hui. Il la synth\u00e9tise avec l’analogie qui importe, avec le personnage qui s’impose comme r\u00e9f\u00e9rence : le Fran\u00e7ais Charles de Gaulle. Alors que le Pentagone a fait des gorges chaudes du \u00ab mod\u00e8le alg\u00e9rien \u00bb pour se donner une r\u00e9f\u00e9rence dans sa guerre irakienne contre l’insurrection, – et pour quels r\u00e9sultats ! Pfaff propose le \u00ab mod\u00e8le alg\u00e9rien \u00bb de la seule fa\u00e7on qui importe et qui vaille, qui est \u00ab l’option de Gaulle \u00bb.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
\t\u00ab Nixon, however, had possessed an option in 1969 that he lacked the courage to choose. He had always said he admired Charles de Gaulle. De Gaulle, when returned to power in 1958, at a moment of extreme crisis in France’s war to defeat Algerian insurgents and to keep Algeria French, recognised that the war was futile, even if the insurrection itself might temporarily be defeated.<\/em> <\/p>\n<\/p>\n\t\u00bb He cut France’s losses. Defying military mutiny, despite significant resistance from French public opinion, and facing assassination attempts and a terrorist campaign directed against him and his government, de Gaulle negotiated Algerian independence. It was an act of cold-blooded courage and realism.<\/em> <\/p>\n<\/p>\n\t\u00bb It did not leave France revealed as ‘a pitiful, helpless giant’, as Nixon said would be the case if the United States left Vietnam. It strengthened France, freeing it to deal with the real issues of political and economic reform. If John Kerry is elected President, he will have the de Gaulle option. He will have a window lasting a few months during which he could reverse US policy and expect, provisionally, to carry public opinion with him.<\/em> \u00bb<\/p>\n<\/p>\n\tWilliam Pfaff donne l\u00e0 une le\u00e7on classique de grand historien, appuy\u00e9e sur le r\u00e9alisme, la raison, le sens de la mesure, l’appr\u00e9ciation \u00e0 long terme et le go\u00fbt des \u00e9quilibres dans les relations internationales ; il donne une le\u00e7on d’humanisme, et non d’humanitarisme \u00e0-la-Kouchner, l’homme postmoderne qui soutient la guerre puis s’offusque, comme un \u00e9poux tromp\u00e9 qui surprend l’objet du d\u00e9lit \u00e0 deux, que les balles tuent et que le feu br\u00fble. Bien entendu, Pfaff n’a aucune chance d’\u00eatre entendu puisqu’il est bien entendu qu’on ne l’\u00e9coute pas. Ces temps sont aveugles et sourds. Il ne reste plus \u00e0 l’honn\u00eate homme qu’\u00e0 prendre date pour quelque part dans un avenir dont nul ne sait rien. <\/p>\n<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Vision d’historien et d’honn\u00eate homme de l’avenir irakien du pr\u00e9sident Kerry 15 ao\u00fbt 2004 William Pfaff signe dans The Observer de ce jour un texte brillant, une analyse d’historien, sur l’avenir d’une pr\u00e9sidence Kerry, en cas d’\u00e9lection du candidat d\u00e9mocrate. Pour Pfaff, certes, cette pr\u00e9sidence sera toute enti\u00e8re domin\u00e9e par la crise irakienne et Kerry,… <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"neve_meta_sidebar":"","neve_meta_container":"","neve_meta_enable_content_width":"","neve_meta_content_width":0,"neve_meta_title_alignment":"","neve_meta_author_avatar":"","neve_post_elements_order":"","neve_meta_disable_header":"","neve_meta_disable_footer":"","neve_meta_disable_title":"","_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[2866,1406,1131,1175,3865],"class_list":["post-66054","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-faits-et-commentaires","tag-johnson","tag-nixon","tag-pfaff","tag-viet-nam","tag-william"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/new.dedefensa.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/66054","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/new.dedefensa.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/new.dedefensa.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/new.dedefensa.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/new.dedefensa.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=66054"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/new.dedefensa.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/66054\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/new.dedefensa.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=66054"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/new.dedefensa.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=66054"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/new.dedefensa.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=66054"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}