HONTE A YVES CALVI ! HONTE A FRANCE 5 !
Au moment où un animateur (Yves Calvi) de la télé d’Etat française (France 5) se permet de faire toute une émission (« C dans l’air ») sur l’Irak où lui et ses invités (« permanents« – c’est la spécialité de la maison!) comme l’éternel et inévitable « expert-journaliste » ou « journaliste-expert » spécialiste du monde arabe Antoine Sfeir et le non moins inévitable officier de réserve et spécialiste des questions de défense Pierre Servent (je ne parlerai pas du 3e, l’omniprésent et notoirement anti-américain Pascal Boniface) …
Répètent (et dénaturent!) ad nauseam le jusqu’ici noble mot de « RÉSISTANTS » pour qualifier des tueurs de femmes et d’enfants qui sont en train de pousser l’Irak au chaos parce qu’ils ne veulent pas lâcher leur droit, qu’ils croyaient éternel, au pouvoir et aux richesses du pays (le militaire Servent, dont d’ailleurs les frères d’armes sont en train de se faire descendre par d’autres prétendus « résistants » du côté de l’Afghanistan à un taux double de celui des Américains en Irak, a eu lui la décence de ne pas l’employer mais… il a laissé faire !)
Au moment même donc où lesdits experts vont jusqu’à présenter Saddam lui-même (qui risque effectivement sa tête pour les quelques charniers qu’il a laissés – bien contre sa volonté ! – derrière lui) comme un… martyr !
Petit retour sur une tribune de septembre dernier (merci Roger) d’un des meilleurs connaisseurs du Monde arabe (hélas encore largement inconnu en France !), Fouad Ajami, actuellement professeur à la prestigieuse université Johns Hopkins de Baltimore, sur les véritables conditions de possibilité d’un Zarkaoui (et de ses successeurs), à savoir le silence aussi assourdissant que complice dudit monde arabe ainsi que la contribution de nos propres medias (Yves Calvi encore !) qui leur prêtent si complaisamment leurs moyens …
Heart of Darkness
From Zarqawi to the man on the street, Sunni Arabs fear Shiite emancipation.
Fouad Ajami
The WSJ
September 28, 2005
The remarkable thing about the terror in Iraq is the silence with which it is greeted in other Arab lands. Grant Abu Musab al-Zarqawi his due: He has been skilled at exposing the pitilessness on the loose in that fabled Arab street and the moral emptiness of so much of official Arab life. The extremist is never just a man of the fringe: He always works at the outer edges of mainstream life, playing out the hidden yearnings and defects of the dominant culture. Zarqawi is a bigot and a killer, but he did not descend from the sky. He emerged out of the Arab world’s sins of omission and commission; in the way he rails against the Shiites (and the Kurds) he expresses that fatal Arab inability to take in « the other. » A terrible condition afflicts the Arabs, and Zarqawi puts it on lethal display: an addiction to failure, and a desire to see this American project in Iraq come to a bloody end.
Zarqawi’s war, it has to be conceded, is not his alone; he kills and maims, he labels the Shiites rafida (rejecters of Islam), he charges them with treason as « collaborators of the occupiers and the crusaders, » but he can be forgiven the sense that he is a holy warrior on behalf of a wider Arab world that has averted its gaze from his crimes, that has given him its silent approval. He and the band of killers arrayed around him must know the meaning of this great Arab silence.
There is a cliché that distinguishes between cultures of shame and cultures of guilt, and by that crude distinction, it has always been said that the Arab world is a « shame culture. » But in truth there is precious little shame in Arab life about the role of the Arabs in the great struggle for and within Iraq. What is one to make of the Damascus-based Union of Arab Writers that has refused to grant membership in its ranks to Iraqi authors? The pretext that Iraqi writers can’t be « accredited » because their country is under American occupation is as good an illustration as it gets of the sordid condition of Arab culture. For more than three decades, Iraq’s life was sheer and limitless terror, and the Union of Arab Writers never uttered a word. Through these terrible decades, Iraqis suffered alone, and still their poetry and literature adorn Arabic letters. They need no acknowledgment of their pain, or of their genius, from a literary union based in a city in the grip of a deadening autocracy.
A culture of shame would surely see into the shame of an Arab official class with no tradition of accountability granting itself the right to hack away at Iraq’s constitution, dismissing it as the handiwork of the American regency. Unreason, an indifference to the most basic of facts, and a spirit of belligerence have settled upon the Arab world. Those who, in Arab lands beyond Iraq, have taken to describing the Iraqi constitution as an « American-Iranian constitution, » give voice to a debilitating incoherence. At the heart of this incoherence lies an adamant determination to deny the Shiites of Iraq a claim to their rightful place in their country’s political order.
The drumbeats against Iraq that originate from the League of Arab States and its Egyptian apparatchiks betray the panic of an old Arab political class afraid that there is something new unfolding in Iraq–a different understanding of political power and citizenship, a possible break with the culture of tyranny and the cult of Big Men disposing of the affairs–and the treasure–of nations. It is pitiable that an Egyptian political class that has abdicated its own dream of modernity and bent to the will of a pharaonic regime is obsessed with the doings in Iraq. But this is the political space left open by the master of the realm. To be sure, there is terror in the streets of Iraq; there is plenty there for the custodians of a stagnant regime in Cairo to point to as a cautionary tale of what awaits societies that break with « secure » ways. But the Egyptian autocracy knows the stakes. An Iraqi polity with a modern social contract would be a rebuke to all that Egypt stands for, a cruel reminder of the heartbreak of Egyptians in recent years. We must not fall for Cairo’s claims of primacy in Arab politics; these are hollow, and Iraq will further expose the rot that has settled upon the political life of Egypt.
Nor ought we be taken in by warnings from Jordan, made by King Abdullah II, of a « Shia crescent » spanning Iran, Iraq, Syria and Lebanon. This is a piece of bigotry and simplification unworthy of a Hashemite ruler, for in the scheme of Arab history the Hashemites have been possessed of moderation and tolerance. Of all Sunni Arab rulers, the Hashemites have been particularly close to the Shiites, but popular opinion in Jordan has been thoroughly infatuated with Saddam Hussein, and Saddamism, and an inexperienced ruler must have reasoned that the Shiite bogey would play well at home.
The truth of Jordan today is official moderation coupled with a civic culture given to anti-Americanism, and hijacked by the Islamists. In that standoff, the country’s political life is off-limits, but the street has its way on Iraq. Verse is still read in Saddam’s praise at poetry readings in Amman, and the lawyers’ syndicate is packed with those eager to join the legal defense teams of Saddam Hussein and his principal lieutenants. Saddam’s two daughters reside in Jordan with no apologies to offer, and no second thoughts about the great crimes committed under the Baath tyranny. Those who know the ways of Jordan speak of cities where religious radicalism and bigotry blow with abandon. Zarqa, the hometown of Abu Musab, is one such place; Salt, the birthplace of a notorious suicide bomber, Raad al-Banna, who last winter brought great tragedy to the Iraqi town of Hilla, killing no fewer than 125 of its people, is another. For a funeral, Banna’s family gave him a « martyr’s wedding, » and the affair became an embarrassment to the regime and the political class. Jordan is yet to make its peace with the new Iraq. (King Abdullah’s « crescent » breaks at any rate: Syria has no Shiites to speak of, and its Alawite rulers are undermining the Shiites of Iraq, feeding a jihadist breed of Sunni warriors for whom the Alawites are children of darkness.)
It was the luck of the imperial draw that the American project in Iraq came to the rescue of the Shiites–and of the Kurds. We may not fully appreciate the historical change we unleashed on the Arab world, but we have given liberty to the stepchildren of the Arab world. We have overturned an edifice of material and moral power that dates back centuries. The Arabs railing against U.S. imperialism and arrogance in Iraq will never let us in on the real sources of their resentments. In the way of « modern » men and women with some familiarity with the doctrines of political correctness, they can’t tell us that they are aggrieved that we have given a measure of self-worth to the seminarians of Najaf and the highlanders of Kurdistan. But that is precisely what gnaws at them.
An edifice of Arab nationalism built by strange bedfellows–the Sunni political and bureaucratic elites, and the Christian Arab pundits who abetted them in the idle hope that they would be spared the wrath of the street and of the mob–was overturned in Iraq. And America, at times ambivalent about its mission, brought along with its military gear a suspicion of the Shiites, a belief that the Iraqi Shiites were an extension of Iran, a community destined to build a sister-republic of the Iranian theocracy. Washington has its cadre of Arabists reared on Arab nationalist historiography. This camp had a seat at the table, but the very scale of what was at play in Iraq, and the redemptionism at the heart of George Bush’s ideology, dwarfed them.
For the Arab enemies of this project of rescue, this new war in Iraq was a replay of an old drama: the fall of Baghdad to the Mongols in 1258. In the received history, the great city of learning, the capital of the Abbasid Caliphate, had fallen to savages, and an age of greatness had drawn to a close. In the legend of that tale, the Mongols sacked the metropolis, put its people to the sword, dumped the books of its libraries in the Tigris. That river, chroniclers insist, flowed, alternately, with the blood of the victims and the ink of the books. It is a tale of betrayal, the selective history maintains. A minister of the caliph, a Shiite by the name of Ibn Alqami, opened the gates of Baghdad to the Mongols. History never rests here, and telescopes easily: In his call for a new holy war against the Shiites, Zarqawi dredges up that history, dismisses the Shiite-led government as « the government of Ibn Alqami’s descendants. » Zarqawi knows the power of this symbolism, and its dark appeal to Sunni Arabs within Iraq.
Zarqawi’s jihadists have sown ruin in Iraq, but they are strangers to that country, and they have needed the harbor given them in the Sunni triangle and the indulgence of the old Baathists. For the diehards, Iraq is now a « stolen country » delivered into the hands of subject communities unfit to rule. Though a decided minority, the Sunni Arabs have a majoritarian mindset and a conviction that political dominion is their birthright. Instead of encouraging a break with the old Manichaean ideologies, the Arab world beyond Iraq feeds this deep-seated sense of historical entitlement. No one is under any illusions as to what the Sunni Arabs would have done had oil been located in their provinces. They would have disowned both north and south and opted for a smaller world of their own and defended it with the sword. But this was not to be, and their war is the panic of a community that fears that it could be left with a realm of « gravel and sand. »
In the aftermath of Katrina, the project of reforming a faraway region and ridding it of its malignancies is harder to sustain and defend. We are face-to-face with the trade-off between duties beyond borders and duties within. At home, for the critics of the war, Katrina is a rod to wave in the face of the Bush administration. To be sure, we did not acquit ourselves well in the aftermath of the storm; we left ourselves open to the gloatings of those eager to see America get its comeuppance. Even Zarqawi weighed in on Katrina, depicting a raid on the northern town of Tal Afar by a joint Iraqi-American force as an attempt on the part of « Bush, the enemy of God » to cover up the great « scandal in facing up to the storm which exposed to the entire world what had happened to the American military due to the wars of attrition it had suffered in Iraq and Afghanistan. »
Those duties within have to be redeemed in the manner that this country has always assumed redemptive projects. But that other project, in the burning grounds of the Arab-Muslim world, remains, and we must remember its genesis. It arose out of a calamity on 9/11, which rid us rudely of the illusions of the ’90s. That era had been a fools’ paradise; Nasdaq had not brought about history’s end. In Kabul and Baghdad, we cut down two terrible regimes; in the neighborhood beyond, there are chameleons in the shadows whose ways are harder to extirpate.
We have not always been brilliant in the war we have waged, for these are lands we did not fully know. But our work has been noble and necessary, and we can’t call a halt to it in midstream. We bought time for reform to take root in several Arab and Muslim realms. Leave aside the rescue of Afghanistan, Kuwait and Qatar have done well by our protection, and Lebanon has retrieved much of its freedom. The three larger realms of Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Syria are more difficult settings, but there, too, the established orders of power will have to accommodate the yearnings for change. A Kuwaiti businessman with an unerring feel for the ways of the Arab world put it thus to me: « Iraq, the Internet, and American power are undermining the old order in the Arab world. There are gains by the day. » The rage against our work in Iraq, all the way from the « chat rooms » of Arabia to the bigots of Finsbury Park in London, is located within this broader struggle.
In that Iraqi battleground, we can’t yet say that the insurgency is in its death throes. But that call to war by Zarqawi, we must know, came after the stunning military operation in Tal Afar dealt the jihadists a terrible blow. An Iraqi-led force, supported by American tanks, armored vehicles and air cover, had stormed that stronghold. This had been a transit point for jihadists coming in from Syria. This time, at Tal Afar, Iraq security forces were there to stay, and a Sunni Arab defense minister with the most impeccable tribal credentials, Saadoun Dulaimi, issued a challenge to Iraq’s enemy, a message that his soldiers would fight for their country.
The claim that our war in Iraq, after the sacrifices, will have hatched a Shiite theocracy is a smear on the war, a misreading of the Shiite world of Iraq. In the holy city of Najaf, at its apex, there is a dread of political furies and an attachment to sobriety. I went to Najaf in July; no one of consequence there spoke of a theocratic state. Najaf’s jurists lived through a time of terror, when informers and assassins had the run of the place. They have been delivered from that time. The new order shall give them what they want: a place in Iraq’s cultural and moral order, and a decent separation between religion and the compromises of political life.
Over the horizon looms a referendum to ratify the country’s constitution. Sunni Arabs are registering in droves, keen not to repeat the error they committed when they boycotted the national elections earlier this year. In their pride, and out of fear of the insurgents and their terror, the Sunni Arabs say that they are registering to vote in order to thwart this « illegitimate constitution. » This kind of saving ambiguity ought to be welcomed, for there are indications that the Sunni Arabs may have begun to understand terror’s blindness and terror’s ruin. Zarqawi holds out but one fate for them; other doors beckon, and there have stepped forth from their ranks leaders eager to partake of the new order. It is up to them, and to the Arab street and the Arab chancelleries that wink at them, to bring an end to the terror. It has not been easy, this expedition to Iraq, and for America in Iraq there has been heartbreak aplenty. But we ought to remember the furies that took us there, and we ought to be consoled by the thought that the fight for Iraq is a fight to ward off Arab dangers and troubles that came our way on a clear September morning, four years ago.
Mr. Ajami teaches International Relations at Johns Hopkins University.
Voir aussi (parmi les rares choses en français – et donc naturellement très critiques – sur Ajami):
Sur le Réseau Voltaire:
Tribunes et décryptages – 27 mai 2005
Les alibis arabes de l’équipe Bush
Décryptage
(…)
La persistance du discours colonial se retrouve dans de nombreux textes d’auteurs arabes servant d’alibi aux think tank néo-conservateurs. Une voix arabe amie de Washington qui n’est pas inutile après le tollé qu’a provoqué l’article de Newsweek sur les profanations du Coran à Guantanamo.
Fouad Ajami poursuit son œuvre de justification a posteriori de la politique du président Bush. Dans le Wall Street Journal et le Daily Star, il affirme que la démocratisation du monde arabe est en marche depuis que les États-Unis ont envahi l’Irak. Bien sûr, l’action militaire n’est pas la meilleure méthode, mais pour ceux qui attendent en vain de puis si longtemps des réformes qui viennent de l’intérieur, ce qui se passe aujourd’hui est une délivrance. Un raisonnement typiquement colonialiste, qui se postule que l’on peut violenter les indigènes pour leur Bien …
Réseau Voltaire
27 mai 2005
Thèmes
Contrôle du « Grand Moyen-Orient »
Auteurs et sources des Tribunes et décryptages
(..)
« Le pays de Bush »
Auteur Fouad Ajami
Fouad Ajami est professeur d’études moyen-orientales à la Johns Hopkins University. Contributeur régulier du magazine Foreign Affairs il est l’auteur de Dream Palace of the Arabs : A Generation’s Odyssey.
Sources Daily Star (Liban), Wall Street Journal (États-Unis)
Référence « Bush Country », par Fouad Ajami, Wall Street Journal, 22 mai 2005.
« We have George W. Bush to thank for the Arab democratic spring », Daily Star, 23 mai 2005.
Résumé Un marchand koweïtien m’a dit récemment que George W. Bush a « libéré un tsunami sur cette région ». Cet homme en a assez d’attendre une réforme venant de l’intérieur, il voulait que la situation change et si cela devait passer par une aide extérieure, qu’il en soit ainsi. Un ami jordanien m’a affirmé que ce qui se passait actuellement au Liban était possible car les manifestants savaient que les États-Unis ne tolèreraient plus une répression comparable à ce qui a eu lieu à Hama en Syrie. Lors de mon voyage dans le monde arabe, je me suis rendu dans le pays de Bush : partout les Arabes sont conscients que cette vague de démocratisation à laquelle ils assistent , ils la doivent aux États-Unis et à leurs actions en Irak.
Le poids de la puissance états-unienne, historiquement du côté de l’ordre dominant, est aujourd’hui en faveur de la libéralisation de la région. Aujourd’hui, un président conservateur offre à son pays une rédemption wilsonienne. Ce changement de politique s’illustre dans les rapports avec Hosni Moubarak. Autrefois, il était l’homme de l’Amérique sur le Nil et il était vu comme un rempart contre l’islamisme. Cela lui a permis de rejeter la politique de Washington en Irak et de marquer son opposition à celle sur la question israélo-palestinienne. Ce faisant, il a alimenté l’anti-modernisme et l’antiaméricanisme dans son pays. Aujourd’hui, les États-Unis exigent de lui une ouverture politique du pays et cela a permis l’apparition de mouvements contestant son règne.
Les États-Unis ont compris que la recherche de la stabilité via le soutien aux dictateurs ne marchait pas et avait conduit au 11 septembre. Face aux islamistes, les Arabes laïques savent que l’exigence de la souveraineté n’est plus adéquate. Ils savent qu’ils sont isolés dans le monde et qu’il leur faut renoncer à certaines vieilles aspirations. C’est bien sûr l’Irak qui a été le début de ce changement d’optique. Malgré les bombes, le mouvement démocratique s’y développe tout comme une presse libre. Ce à quoi on assiste dans le monde arabe est similaire au printemps des peuples de 1848 en Europe. La révolution démocratique se propage de pays en pays. C’est George W. Bush qui a initié ce mouvement.
Tribunes et décryptages – 29 mars 2004
(…)
« Le dernier rire du maure »
Auteur Fouad Ajami
Fouad Ajami est professeur d’études moyen-orientales à la Johns Hopkins University. Contributeur régulier du magazine Foreign Affairs il est l’auteur de Dream Palace of the Arabs : A Generation’s Odyssey.
Source Wall Street Journal (États-Unis)
Référence « The Moor’s Last Laugh », par Fouad Ajami, Wall Street Journal, 28 mars 2004.
Résumé Les musulmans n’ont pas oublié la perte de Grenade en 1492 tout comme ils restent marqués par la perte des Balkans, mais leur revanche est venue par la démographie. Aujourd’hui 15 millions de musulmans vivent en Europe. Les premiers migrants ont vécu dans le mythe d’un passage temporaire en Europe, mais l’évolution du monde arabe les y a fait rester.
Dans les années 80, il y a eu une guerre civile dans le monde arabe et elle a été gagnée par les dirigeants autoritaires arabes contre les islamistes qui se sont installés en Europe d’où ils ont poursuivi leur subversion. Ces hommes sont venus avec leur foi et une volonté missionnaire au pays des « incroyants ». Ils rejetèrent la logique de l’assimilation et interdisent à leurs filles et sœurs de se mélanger avec les « étrangers ».
C’est dans ce contexte que Mohammed Atta se radicalisa à Hambourg et non au Liban d’où il venait. Il est devenu un musulman haïssant l’Occident. Les télévisions satellites ont un grand rôle dans ces mouvements. Elles diffusent des prêcheurs faisant la promotion de leurs préceptes. Dans les banlieues françaises, on rêve de venger la colonisation du Maghreb au XIXème siècle et les politiques leur font des concessions en politique étrangère. L’antiaméricanisme est devenu en France le moyen de ne pas subir la fureur de l’islamisme.
Les pays arabes ne proposent pas d’alternative et l’islamisme se renforce. Chirac croît être épargné en s’opposant à la Guerre d’Irak, mais il se trompe. Les tendances démographiques montrent que la présence musulmane continue de se développer en Europe.