imaginer les risques terroristes

En ce 11 septembre, je ne résiste pas à vous livrer ce passage du livre de Mikkel Vedby Rasmussen, The Risk Society at War (pp. 66-67) : Après l'attentat au sarin dans le métro de Tokyo (1995), Clinton fait lire à ses conseillers en matière de lutte anti-terroriste les fictions existantes sur le sujet (et notamment les ouvrages de Tom Clancy). Cette démarche est rapprochée par l'auteur de celle des compagnies d'assurances qui envisagent et imaginent les risques (risk profiling) avant de fixer le coût des polices d'assurance permettant d'y faire face. Dans le cas du terrorisme, il s'agit de débrider l'imagination pour penser le pire afin d'élaborer les politiques de luttes anti-terroriste permettant d'y faire face. Cette anecdote montre bien comment une analyse rationnelle reste insuffisante pour appréhender le terrorisme. Selon l'auteur, la planification militaire s'apparentrait désormais à de la science fiction, afin de se préparer à affronter un ennemi qui n'existe pas encore, mais dont on peut déjà anticiper les modes d'action ...

Sans porter de jugement sur les politiques de lutte contre le terrorisme qui ont pu être depuis développées, cette citation me paraît intéressante pour souligner qu'en matière de gestion des risques, il faut aussi savoir faire preuve de créativité et d'imagination pour sortir des idées les plus communément admises, penser l'inconcevable et comme le dit Patrick Lagadec penser hors des cadres ("thinking out of the box").

Voici l'extrait :

"The need to imagine what might happen is even more pivotal when it comes to assessing what one's enemy might be up to. Following a Japanese cult's attack on passengers in the Tokyo subway with chemical weapons in 1995, President Clinton turned to the fiction of Tom Clancy and other popular novelits in order to think through what might happen if the United States was subjected to a similar attack, and he sent the books to his anti-terrorist team for comments. No doubt a lot people with PhDs in international security or strategy will look down their noses when people in high office use popular fiction as the basis for policy, but in the context of "risk society" it actually makes a lot of sense.

In a series of bestselling novels, Tom Clancy has made standard national security scenarios come to life by placing them in a narrative form. A Clancy novel is basically a RAND report written in the style of a thriller. Though his book is not science fiction in the strict sense, Clancy has used Stealth bombers, Predators drones and other new military technologies in his books before they became fully operational or widely known to the public. Thus the narrative of the novel provides a possibility to see how the use of RMA technology will play out, just as Clancy's scenarios for a terrorist attack on the US with nuclear or chemical weapons served as a way to show President Clinton what could happen. Clancy's novels are what Giddens describes as "risk profiling", which is what insurance companies undertake to calculate the odds on a house burning down as a basis for pricing an insurance policy. Luckily chemical attacks on civilians are a lot less common than houses burning down, but for this very reason the risk profiling of such events is all the harder. Fiction is one way of making up all the data.
Fiction makes possible future real in a way the more dry narratives of intelligence service and military planners cannot. [...] In Ulrich Beck's words, the future becomes a "real virtuality". From that point of view, defence planning in the US, and increasingly in other NATO countries as well, is now science fiction. [...] This approach focuses on how an adversary might fight rather than who that adversary might be or where he might want to engage the battle".