Last updated october 16th, 2002
Dernière mise à jour le 26 mars 2003
LA CRÉDIBILITÉ AMÉRICAINE
2003/03/25 (Agence Science-Presse) "En ces temps de guerre, une question tourmente beaucoup d'Américains: pourquoi la communauté internationale est-elle à ce point contre eux? "La bataille pour l'opinion publique a été perdue il y a deux ans, affirme l'auteur américain Bill McKibben (The End of Nature, Staying Human in an Engineered Age), lorsque nous avons renié, refusé et saboté une série d'ententes internationales, la plus connue étant le Protocole de Kyoto sur les changements climatiques. Et le principal problème n'était pas que nous étions perçus comme arrogants -ce que nous étions. Le principal problème était que les gens ne pouvaient tout simplement pas croire que nous étions prêts à ignorer ce qui en était venu à apparaître comme un danger évident et actuel, l'instabilité climatique croissante de notre planète." "Le changement climatique ne constitue pas le même genre de menace qu'un dictateur instable, mais ce n'est pas non plus entièrement différent. Saddam Hussein est le problème de cette année; le réchauffement global est le problème de ce siècle..." Il a suffi d'un discours du nouveau président Bush pour tout jeter par terre. On peut comprendre les Européens d'en avoir gardé rancune. "Il est le président qui a crié il n'y a pas de loup. Il ne devrait pas être surpris que les peuples lui répondent la même chose, de l'autre côté de l'Atlantique."
ON ORWELL AND SADDAM HUSSEIN
" THE ORWELL DEBATE: (...) Hitch (...) made one point in particular that resonated. On the way there, we were confronted with protestors with "No War On Iraq" posters. Hitch noticed the Orwellian resonance of this slogan. The slogan, strictly speaking, is a lie, one of many promoted by the anti-war left and right. There is no possibility of a war with "Iraq." Half the country - inhabited by the Kurds and Shia Muslims - is already protected from Saddam's murderous designs by British and American air-power. The remaining rump is not a country as such; it's a population terrorized by a police state run by a sadistic maniac. We are not therefore at war with the country or people of Iraq; and by equating Saddam with Iraq, these so-called "peace-protestors" are de facto parties to his vile propaganda, the notion that Iraq is Saddam and Saddam is Iraq. That lie was recently displayed in the humiliating spectacle of grown human beings not simply being required to vote for Saddam, as Hitch observed, but actually to dance in the streets to celebrate him, to humiliate themselves out of terror. This disgusting spectacle wasn't like "1984." It was "1984." And this is what the anti-war movement now finds itself defending. I watched part of the anti-war rally in DC on C-SPAN this weekend. Not a single speaker even addressed the evil in Baghdad. In their attempt to derail any attempt to disarm Saddam, and in their facile equation of Saddam with Iraq, they show the empty, bitter center of their alleged morality. " - Andrew Sullivan
SUR LE COMPROMIS
"Je suis de plus en plus fasciné par la beauté du compromis. Quand j'étais jeune, je croyais que c'était un mot malhonnête. Je sais aujourd'hui que c'est l'envers du fanatisme... 70 p.c. des Israéliens et des Palestiniens savent pertinemment que la terre sur laquelle ils vivent devra être divisée en deux états... ce serait déjà fait si nous n'étions pas dirigés, de chaque côté, par des incapables." Et si des criminels fanatisés ne faisaient pas, de ces incapables, les empereurs de leurs ruines." - Amoz Oz, repris par le chroniqueur Pierre Foglia
ABOUT THE UN RESOLUTIONS ON IRAQ
"Q: Why hasn't the United Nations enforced the resolutions it passed on Iraqi weapons of mass destruction?"
"A: Under Article 45 (b) of the UN Charter, 'the primary responsibility for saving the world from itself shall be the United States' problem' while the UN 'shall concentrate on vetoing any U.S. attempt to do something about it and denouncing it for unilateralism.'"
ON PEACE AT ALL COSTS
"My disagreement with the peace-at-any-price men, the ultrapacifists, is not in the least because they favor peace. I object to them, first, because they have proved themselves futile and impotent in working for peace, and second, because they commit what is not merely the capital error but the crime against morality of failing to uphold righteousness as the all-important end toward which we should strive ... I have as little sympathy for them as they have for the men who deify mere brutal force, who insist that power justifies wrongdoing, and who declare that there is no such thing as international morality. But the ultra-pacifists really play into the hands of these men. To condemn equally might which backs right and might which overthrows right is to render positive service to wrong-doers ... To denounce the nation that wages war in self-defense, or from a generous desire to relieve the oppressed, in the same terms in which we denounce war waged in a spirit of greed or wanton folly stands on a par with denouncing equally a murderer and the policeman who, at peril of his life and by force of arms, arrests the murderer. In each case the denunciation denotes not loftiness of soul but weakness both of mind and morals." - Theodore Roosevelt
ON SETI RESEARCH
"Whatever the result of SETI and life searches might be, we will gaze upon the stars more knowingly, but certainly not less reverently." - John Wells