Excellent article de Patrick Cockburn dans The Independent qui analyse la déconnexion médiatique et politique entre les affaires de terrorisme en Europe et les politiques étrangères occidentales qui ont favorisé ces phénomènes au Moyen-Orient (surtout) et ici (un peu), de l’Irak en passant par la Libye, le Yémen et la Syrie :
▻http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/politics/how-politicians-duck-the-blame-for-terrorism-a6942016.html
There has always been a disconnect in the minds of people in Europe between the wars in Iraq and Syria and terrorist attacks against Europeans. This is in part because Baghdad and Damascus are exotic and frightening places, and pictures of the aftermath of bombings have been the norm since the US invasion of 2003. But there is a more insidious reason why Europeans do not sufficiently take on board the connection between the wars in the Middle East and the threat to their own security. Separating the two is much in the interests of Western political leaders, because it means that the public does not see that their disastrous policies in Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya and beyond created the conditions for the rise of Isis and for terrorist gangs such as that to which Salah Abdeslam belonged.
Suit le détail par Cockburn de ces conflits, dans lesquels les dirigeants occidentaux portent une lourde responsabilité et qui ont permis l’aggravation de ces phénomènes terroristes :
A strange aspect of these conflicts is that Western leaders have never had to pay any political price for their role in initiating them or pursuing policies that effectively stoke the violence. Isis is a growing power in Libya, something that would not have happened had David Cameron and Nicolas Sarkozy not helped destroy the Libyan state by overthrowing Gaddafi in 2011. Al-Qaeda is expanding in Yemen, where Western leaders have given a free pass to Saudi Arabia to launch a bombing campaign that has wrecked the country.
Suit le témoignage de Balanche sur sa censure dans les médias qui se plaint d’un mc carthysme intellectuel :
It is worth quoting at length Fabrice Balanche , the French cartographer and expert on Syria who now works for the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, about these misperceptions in France, although they also apply to other countries. He told Aron Lund of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace: “The media refused to see the Syrian revolt as anything other than the continuation of revolutions in Tunisia and Egypt, at a time of enthusiasm over the Arab Spring. Journalists didn’t understand the sectarian subtleties in Syria, or perhaps they didn’t want to understand; I was censored many times.
“Syrian intellectuals in the opposition, many of whom had been in exile for decades, had a discourse similar to that of the Iraqi opposition during the US invasion of 2003. Some of them honestly confused their own hopes for a non-sectarian society with reality, but others – such as the Muslim Brotherhood – tried to obfuscate reality in order to gain the support of Western countries.
“ In 2011–2012, we suffered a type of intellectual McCarthyism on the Syrian question: if you said that Assad was not about to fall within three months, you would be suspected of being paid by the Syrian regime. And with the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs having taken up the cause of the Syrian opposition, it would have been in bad taste to contradict its communiqués. ”
By taking up the cause of the Syrian and Libyan opposition and destroying the Syrian and Libyan states, France and Britain opened the door to Isis and should share in the blame for the rise of Isis and terrorism in Europe. By refusing to admit to or learn from past mistakes, the West Europeans did little to lay the basis for the current, surprisingly successful “cessation of hostilities” in Syria which is almost entirely an US and Russian achievement.
Britain and France have stuck close to Saudi Arabia and the Gulf monarchies in their policies towards Syria. I asked a former negotiator why this was so and he crisply replied: “Money. They wanted Saudi contracts.”
