#jeffrey_goldberg

Plein de choses intéressantes dans cette gigantesque interview. Plein de mensonges aussi et d’arrangements d’Obama avec la vérité.

Though he has argued, controversially, that the Middle East’s conflicts “date back millennia,” he also believes that the intensified Muslim fury of recent years was encouraged by countries considered friends of the U.S. In a meeting during apec with Malcolm Turnbull, the new prime minister of Australia, Obama described how he has watched Indonesia gradually move from a relaxed, syncretistic Islam to a more fundamentalist, unforgiving interpretation; large numbers of Indonesian women, he observed, have now adopted the hijab, the Muslim head covering.

Why, Turnbull asked, was this happening?

Because, Obama answered, the Saudis and other Gulf Arabs have funneled money, and large numbers of imams and teachers, into the country. In the 1990s, the Saudis heavily funded Wahhabist madrassas, seminaries that teach the fundamentalist version of Islam favored by the Saudi ruling family, Obama told Turnbull. Today, Islam in Indonesia is much more Arab in orientation than it was when he lived there, he said.

“Aren’t the Saudis your friends?,” Turnbull asked.

Obama smiled. “It’s complicated,” he said.

Obama’s patience with Saudi Arabia has always been limited. In his first foreign-policy commentary of note, that 2002 speech at the antiwar rally in Chicago, he said, “You want a fight, President Bush? Let’s fight to make sure our so-called allies in the Middle East—the Saudis and the Egyptians—stop oppressing their own people, and suppressing dissent, and tolerating corruption and inequality.” In the White House these days, one occasionally hears Obama’s National Security Council officials pointedly reminding visitors that the large majority of 9/11 hijackers were not Iranian, but Saudi—and Obama himself rails against Saudi Arabia’s state-sanctioned misogyny, arguing in private that “a country cannot function in the modern world when it is repressing half of its population.” In meetings with foreign leaders, Obama has said, “You can gauge the success of a society by how it treats its women.”

His frustration with the Saudis informs his analysis of Middle Eastern power politics. At one point I observed to him that he is less likely than previous presidents to axiomatically side with Saudi Arabia in its dispute with its archrival, Iran. He didn’t disagree.

Un bout de traduction en fançais
Barack Obama se confie à « The Atlantic »
▻http://www.lematin.ch/monde/Bientot-hors-de-la-Maison-Blanche-Obama-se-confie-/story/21226617

Je pense, étant donné la densité et l’intérêt de cette interview qu’il pourrait être utile qu’un certain nombre de seen thissiens anglicisants et intéressés par le Proche-Orient et la géopolitique mondiale s’assignent la tâche d’en extraire les passages les plus dignes d’intérêt, de les résumer et de les commenter sous le tag #Obama_doctrine.
Moon of Alabama a déjà fait un commentaire en s’intéressant au côté blanchiment qu’opère Obama de sa politique : ▻http://www.moonofalabama.org/2016/03/the-obama-doctrine-is-to-whitewash-his-foreign-policy.html

Et bien entendu, pour les (larbins de luxe des) pays du Golfe comme pour Jeffrey Goldberg « les Arabes » c’est les pays du Golfe,
▻http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2016/03/obama-doctrine-middle-east/473178

It is as if the president of the United States is declaring a whole generation of Arabs as the devil’s rejects.

#Bande_de_fumistes (#Obama compris)

Off-the-Record Session With the President on ISIS Raises Concerns
By MARGARET SULLIVAN SEPTEMBER 17, 2014 3:15 PMSeptember 17, 2014 4:03 pm 3 Comments
▻http://publiceditor.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/09/17/off-the-record-session-with-the-president-on-isis-raises

Tom English of Jackson Heights wrote, “to me, it really looks like the meeting was held to run talking/propaganda points by the media to see how best to sell the war.” Judith Abrams of Newton, Mass., asked, “how can I have confidence in the reporting in the Times when the government and the journalists appear to have such a symbiotic relationship?” And Eric Kodish, chairman of the bioethics department at the Cleveland Clinic, wondered about the ethics of using information from those who were not supposed to talk about what they had heard.

(...)

As I noted above, Mr. Obama didn’t invent these off-the-record sessions, not by a long shot. But such meetings shouldn’t be a substitute for allowing news reporters, on behalf of the public, to grill the president on the record – especially on a subject as weighty and important as impending military action. But increasingly, they seem to be just that. Readers are right to be troubled about the implications.