Un long et intéressant article de Robert F. Kennedy Jr - oui, oui, c’est bien le fils de Bob... - fait une rétrospective des opérations de changement de régime au Moyen-Orient en lien avec la question de la géopolitique de l’énergie, afin d’éclairer la guerre en Syrie. C’est aussi, bien sûr, un réquisitoire contre ces opérations.
Certains faits évoqués sur l’actuel conflit syrien ont été déjà largement évoqués par plusieurs seen thissiens. Mais certains faits plus anciens sont cependant moins connus :
▻http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2016/02/rfk-jr-why-arabs-dont-trust-america-213601?o=0
Why the Arabs Don’t Want Us in Syria
They don’t hate ‘our freedoms.’ They hate that we’ve betrayed our ideals in their own countries—for oil. / R.F. Kennedy Jr ; 22.02.16
A titre d’exemple cet extrait sur le choix dès l’époque Eisenhower de jouer le fondamentalisme islamique (aussi bien des Saudiens que des Frères musulmans) contre le nationalisme arabe, ou bien la question des routes de l’énergie dans le choix américain de renverser le chef d’Etat syrien Quwatli par un coup d’Etat militaire en 1949 :
For Americans to really understand what’s going on, it’s important to review some details about this sordid but little-remembered history. During the 1950s, President Eisenhower and the Dulles brothers—CIA Director Allen Dulles and Secretary of State John Foster Dulles—rebuffed Soviet treaty proposals to leave the Middle East a neutral zone in the Cold War and let Arabs rule Arabia. Instead, they mounted a clandestine war against Arab nationalism—which Allen Dulles equated with communism—particularly when Arab self-rule threatened oil concessions. They pumped secret American military aid to tyrants in Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Iraq and Lebanon favoring puppets with conservative Jihadist ideologies thath they regarded as a reliable antidote to Soviet Marxism. At a White House meeting between the CIA’s director of plans, Frank Wisner, and John Foster Dulles, in September 1957, Eisenhower advised the agency, “We should do everything possible to stress the ‘holy war’ aspect,” according to a memo recorded by his staff secretary, Gen. Andrew J. Goodpaster.
The CIA began its active meddling in Syria in 1949—barely a year after the agency’s creation. Syrian patriots had declared war on the Nazis, expelled their Vichy French colonial rulers and crafted a fragile secularist democracy based on the American model. But in March 1949, Syria’s democratically elected president, Shukri-al-Quwatli, hesitated to approve the Trans-Arabian Pipeline, an American project intended to connect the oil fields of Saudi Arabia to the ports of Lebanon via Syria. In his book, Legacy of Ashes, CIA historian Tim Weiner recounts that in retaliation for Al-Quwatli’s lack of enthusiasm for the U.S. pipeline, the CIA engineered a coup replacing al-Quwatli with the CIA’s handpicked dictator, a convicted swindler named Husni al-Za’im. Al-Za’im barely had time to dissolve parliament and approve the American pipeline before his countrymen deposed him, four and a half months into his regime.
