Rest Of the World<\/em>, celui sur lequel justement on veut exercer son empire, existe et qu’il faut s’en pr\u00e9occuper si l’on veut le conqu\u00e9rir. Brown nous peint un Washington D.C. qui se veut imp\u00e9rial et qui n’est que provincial, pr\u00e9occup\u00e9 de sa seule petite existence et de ses seuls petits affrontements internes, qui a transform\u00e9 le pouvoir am\u00e9ricaniste en une atomisation de divers centres d’int\u00e9r\u00eat, de pression, de divers petits pouvoirs concurrents acharn\u00e9s, qui se d\u00e9chirent.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n\tIl s’agit certainement du travers fatal de Washington, cette incapacit\u00e9 de sortir de lui-m\u00eame, cette ignorance pathologique du monde ext\u00e9rieur. On ne peut conqu\u00e9rir un monde dont non seulement on ignore l’existence, mais dont, finalement, on nie l’existence.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
\tL’extrait ci-dessous, qui implique essentiellement Rumsfeld et Cheney, les concerne tous. Cette phrase, que Brown emprunte \u00e0 Benjamin Barber, nous dit tout, finalement, de ce qu’il faut penser de cette \u00e9norme puissance si compl\u00e8tement d\u00e9risoire, ce mammouth qui rugissait comme une souris: \u00abThe United States remains a hegemonic global superpower sporting the narrow outlook of mini-states like Monaco and Lichtenstein.<\/em>\u00bb<\/p>\n<\/p>\n\t\u00abFor 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.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/p>\n\t\u00bbIf 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.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/p>\n\t\u00bbTo 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.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/p>\n\t\u00bbPolitical 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.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/p>\n\t\u00bbIn 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.<\/em>\u00bb<\/p>\n<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
\tMis en ligne le 20 novembre 2007 \u00e0 10H32<\/p><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
John Brown est un ancien officier du Foreign Service, c’est-\u00e0-dire un fonctionnaire du d\u00e9partement d’Etat form\u00e9 \u00e0 l’\u00e9cole diplomatique US. Il d\u00e9missionna peu avant l’attaque de l’Irak, pour protester contre cette guerre. Depuis, il observe et commente la sc\u00e8ne diplomatique de Washington, avec une pr\u00e9cision critique extr\u00eamement fine de la d\u00e9cadence de la diplomatie US.… <\/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":[2],"tags":[7240,4038,708,1381,7239],"class_list":["post-69428","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-bloc-notes","tag-barber","tag-brown","tag-empire","tag-engelhardt","tag-province"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/new.dedefensa.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/69428","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=69428"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/new.dedefensa.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/69428\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/new.dedefensa.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=69428"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/new.dedefensa.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=69428"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/new.dedefensa.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=69428"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}