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Samedi, c’était le neuvième anniversaire des attentats de septembre 2001. Anniversaire n’est évidemment pas le bon mot, désolé, mais vous savez de quoi on parle : il y a neuf ans, 19 terroristes ont détourné quatre avions de ligne pour ouvrir un nouveau front dans le jihad international.

J’attire votre attention sur le texte de feu Hunter S. Thompson, parrain du journalisme gonzo, qui s’est jadis fendu d’une chronique qui semble avoir été écrite à la lueur d’une boule de cristal, tant ses prédictions sont justes. Et ce bon vieux Hunter n’avait le bénéfice d’aucun recul : la chronique a été publiée le lendemain, le 12 sptembre 2001, sous la bannière d’ESPN. Extraits :

It will be a Religious War, a sort of Christian Jihad, fueled by religious hatred and led by merciless fanatics on both sides. It will be guerilla warfare on a global scale, with no front lines and no identifiable enemy.

We are going to punish somebody for this attack, but just who or what will be blown to smithereens for it is hard to say. Maybe Afghanistan, maybe Pakistan or Iraq, or possibly all three at once. Who knows? Not even the Generals in what remains of the Pentagon or the New York papers calling for WAR seem to know who did it or where to look for them.

Et, surtout, ce paragraphe, qui évoque déjà Guantanamo, le Patriot Act et autres excès ont dénaturé cette grande démocratie américaine, dommages collatéraux que bien peu de gens entrevoyaient, moins de 24 heures après les attaques :

This is going to be a very expensive war, and Victory is not guaranteed — for anyone, and certainly not for anyone as baffled as George W. Bush. All he knows is that his father started the war a long time ago, and that he, the goofy child-President, has been chosen by Fate and the global Oil industry to finish it Now. He will declare a National Security Emergency and clamp down Hard on Everybody, no matter where they live or why. If the guilty won’t hold up their hands and confess, he and the Generals will ferret them out by force.

Je vous invite à lire deux excellents textes publiés dans la presse américaine au sujet des excès de la réponse des États-Unis aux attaques de 2001. Ces excès, en bafouant des libertés individuelles et des droits humains qui nous (j’entends par là « nous », les démocraties occidentales) différencient des idéaux jihadistes, jouent directement dans les mains de ben Laden et autres barbus excités.

Il s’agit, primo, d’une chronique du journaliste Ted Koppel, publiée dans le Washington Post. Extrait :

The goal of any organized terrorist attack is to goad a vastly more powerful enemy into an excessive response. And over the past nine years, the United States has blundered into the 9/11 snare with one overreaction after another. Bin Laden deserves to be the object of our hostility, national anguish and contempt, and he deserves to be taken seriously as a canny tactician. But much of what he has achieved we have done, and continue to do, to ourselves. Bin Laden does not deserve that we, even inadvertently, fulfill so many of his unimagined dreams.

Ainsi que :

We have raced to Afghanistan and Iraq, and more recently to Yemen and Somalia; we have created a swollen national security apparatus; and we are so absorbed in our own fury and so oblivious to our enemy’s intentions that we inflate the building of an Islamic center in Lower Manhattan into a national debate and watch, helpless, while a minister in Florida outrages even our friends in the Islamic world by threatening to burn copies of the Koran.

Et, deuzio, d’un billet de James Fallows sur son blogue du magazine The Atlantic, qui reprend ce thème de la réponse exagérée, thème « qui ne faisait pas partie des discussions courantes » en 2005 (quand Fallows a écrit un long papier pour son magazine sur les lendemains des attaques de 2001) mais qui, en 2009, est en train de le devenir. Extrait du billet :

The theme was: terrorists don’t threaten a modern society through the damage they directly inflict. Not through the buildings destroyed, the airplanes brought down, nor even the innocent people killed. All those consequences are terrible, as we will reflect upon once more tomorrow. But the real danger of terrorist attacks, and the real aspiration of those who plan them, is the destructive over-reaction they provoke. Four years ago I quoted an anti-terrorism expert thus: (…) “”It is not the people al-Qaeda might kill that is the threat,” he concluded. “Our reaction is what can cause the damage. It’s al-Qaeda plus our response that creates the existential danger.”

Voilà.