21 juillet 2008 — Nous avons d\u00e9couvert cette conversation entre deux analystes que nous appr\u00e9cions en g\u00e9n\u00e9ral, P\u00e9p\u00e9 Escobar et Gareth Porter. Escobar interroge l’historien Porter (vid\u00e9o et trancription sur The Real News Network<\/em> [TRNN], le 18 juillet<\/a>) sur un sujet d’un tr\u00e8s grand int\u00e9r\u00eat : «Obama and the Cold War mentality<\/em>». Il s’agit d’une conversation sur la personnalit\u00e9 d’Obama, et cette personnalit\u00e9 confront\u00e9e au syst\u00e8me, c’est-\u00e0-dire \u00e0 la nomenklatura<\/em> avec ses apparatchik<\/em> du domaine de la s\u00e9curit\u00e9 nationale, qui p\u00e8se de tout son poids sur Washington et la politique \u00e9trang\u00e8re des USA, – c’est-\u00e0-dire, au travers des hommes et de leur conformisme de fer, le v\u00e9ritable syst\u00e8me qui emprisonne Washington. Les termes employ\u00e9s du temps de l’URSS de Brejnev et repris ici le sont pour d\u00e9signer parfaitement l’esprit qui y r\u00e8gne, et le terme d'\u00a0\u00bbemprisonner\u00a0\u00bb est parfaitement \u00e0 sa place… Contre cela, que peut faire Obama? Obama veut-il et peut-il faire changer les choses?<\/p>\n<\/p>\n Le d\u00e9bat est bien r\u00e9sum\u00e9 par un point de la premi\u00e8re question d’Escobar: Obama semble double, il montre \u00e0 la fois une \u00ab\u00a0mentalit\u00e9 de Guerre froide\u00a0\u00bb, dans ses projets vis-\u00e0-vis de l’Afghanistan et dans d’autres domaines de s\u00e9curit\u00e9 nationale, et en m\u00eame temps il apparaît comme progressiste et anti-guerre… Comment peut-on \u00eatre ceci et cela, d’une fa\u00e7on si contradictoire? On ne peut-\u00eatre que ceci ou<\/strong> cela, en toute logique, n’est-ce pas?<\/p>\n<\/p>\n «Et le probl\u00e8me est que c’est les deux \u00e0 la fois, <\/em>dit Porter. Et c’est parce qu’<\/em>[Obama] est une figure contradictoire dans un syst\u00e8me qui est profond\u00e9ment dysfonctionnel dans les termes de ce qu’il produit dans nombre de domaines, et particuli\u00e8rement dans celui de la s\u00e9curit\u00e9 nationale.<\/em>»<\/p>\n<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n L’analyse de Porter est particuli\u00e8rement fine, et l’emploi des termes \u00e0 mesure. Il place cette analyse autour de la psychologie d’un homme, sans doute destin\u00e9 \u00e0 devenir pr\u00e9sident des Etats-Unis, certainement accompagn\u00e9 d’une pouss\u00e9e populaire pour faire des changements importants, lui-m\u00eame convaincu que certains changements sont n\u00e9cessaires, et plac\u00e9 bient\u00f4t dans une situation où il pourrait envisager de lancer ces changements et où il ne le pourra sans doute pas, – parce qu’il est prisonnier<\/strong> d’une mentalit\u00e9 qui l’a investi et qui impr\u00e8gne sa psychologie \u00e0 c\u00f4t\u00e9 de la perception de ce besoin de changement… «Obama is, you know, remarkably so within the context of the Democratic Party, let alone the political system in general, is a<\/em> captive<\/em><\/strong> of what you call—and I think correctly so—Cold War mentality, that is to say, a mentality that begins with a whole set of assumptions that have very little to do with reality…<\/em>»<\/p>\n<\/p>\n Porter d\u00e9crit parfaitement le climat, l’entourage, la pression qui vont s’installer autour d’Obama lorsqu’il sera pr\u00e9sident, qui l’accompagnent d\u00e9j\u00e0. Il a \u00e9t\u00e9 fait grand cas de l’article d’Elisabeth Bumiller, le 18 juillet<\/a> dans le New York Times<\/em>, d\u00e9crivant l’incroyable \u00e9quipe de s\u00e9curit\u00e9 nationale (300 experts!) qui entoure Obama, – soi disant pour \u00ab\u00a0\u00e9duquer\u00a0\u00bb un homme qui, paraît-il, n’a aucune exp\u00e9rience en mati\u00e8re de politique de s\u00e9curit\u00e9 nationale. On dirait qu’ils sont l\u00e0, d\u00e9j\u00e0, pour le phagocyter, pour l’emp\u00eacher de d\u00e9velopper une pens\u00e9e qui ne serait pas conforme, puisqu’en v\u00e9rit\u00e9 un accident est toujours possible. Les optimistes, comme Steve Clemons (le 19 juillet<\/a> sur The Washington Note<\/em>), croient \u00e0 une manœuvre intelligente d’Obama: au lien d’\u00eatre phagocyt\u00e9, c’est lui qui les \u00ab\u00a0colonise\u00a0\u00bb<\/p>\n<\/p>\n («Thus, what Bumiller might have said is that Obama himself is colonizing the public intellectuals scene – rather than focusing on the fact that all of these people are supposedly advising him. The closer truth is that Obama is colonizing them. And that’s politically smart<\/em>»).<\/p>\n<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n Il s’agit d’une hypoth\u00e8se un peu trop habile, un peu trop \u00ab\u00a0intelligente\u00a0\u00bb, justement ; et, peut-\u00eatre, d’une hypoth\u00e8se trop irr\u00e9aliste qui fait la part belle \u00e0 l’hypoth\u00e9tique ultime vertu de l’am\u00e9ricanisme parce qu’elle suppose que l’homme (Obama) pourrait se d\u00e9faire des chaînes du syst\u00e8me gr\u00e2ce aux moyens du syst\u00e8me, en restant \u00e0 l’int\u00e9rieur du syst\u00e8me. Une sorte de happy end<\/em> hollywoodien.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n Le probl\u00e8me d’Obama, tel que le d\u00e9crit justement Porter, c’est qu’il est prisonnier de lui-m\u00eame en \u00e9tant prisonnier du syst\u00e8me; son originalit\u00e9 \u00e9ventuelle est qu’une partie de lui-m\u00eame pourrait en venir \u00e0 la conclusion qu’il serait n\u00e9cessaire qu’il s’\u00e9vade du syst\u00e8me, donc qu’il s’\u00e9vade de lui-m\u00eame. Le probl\u00e8me g\u00e9n\u00e9ral est qu’il n’est pas sûr qu’Obama accepte l’id\u00e9e qu’il est \u00ab\u00a0prisonnier\u00a0\u00bb, parce que la pens\u00e9e qui l’emprisonne est une pens\u00e9e libre en apparence. Au regard de la situation \u00e0 Washington, de l’enseignement du pass\u00e9, de la puissance extraordinaire du syst\u00e8me, on peut \u00eatre difficilement optimiste sur l’issue de cet \u00e9ventuel affrontement psychologique int\u00e9rieur. Porter est effectivement dans cet \u00e9tat d’esprit. \u00ab\u00a0Vous voulez dire qu’on ne peut rien faire de l’int\u00e9rieur du syst\u00e8me?\u00a0\u00bb, lui dit en substance Escobar :<\/p>\n<\/p>\n «I think that it probably is impossible to change the system from the inside. It would require a president who is ready to go down in flames on the basis of his understanding of what needs to be done, and the willingness to essentially defy his entire national security bureaucracy…<\/em>»<\/p>\n<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n L’analyse de Porter est impeccable. Cela ne signifie pas que la situation soit boucl\u00e9e \u00e0 100% (dans le sens de l’absence de changement), cela signifie qu’il est raisonnable de la consid\u00e9rer comme boucl\u00e9e, disons \u00e0 99,5%-99,6%. Il ne reste que l’hypoth\u00e8se de l’accident, impr\u00e9vu par d\u00e9finition, inattendu par essence, impossible \u00e0 pr\u00e9voir et \u00e0 \u00ab\u00a0programmer\u00a0\u00bb. C’est effectivement l'\u00a0\u00bbhypoth\u00e8se Gorbatchev\u00a0\u00bb<\/a>, – qui existe toujours, \u00e0 notre sens<\/a>. Le paradoxe qui devrait faire r\u00e9fl\u00e9chir est que l'\u00a0\u00bbhypoth\u00e8se Gorbatchev\u00a0\u00bb est d’autant plus difficile que le cadre US est celui d’une d\u00e9mocratie formelle, au contraire de ce qu’\u00e9tait l’URSS. Il y r\u00e8gne donc une structure \u00ab\u00a0climatique\u00a0\u00bb si l’on veut, encore plus qu’un \u00ab\u00a0climat\u00a0\u00bb, qui permet de ressentir l’impression de la libert\u00e9 de pens\u00e9e en permettant en th\u00e9orie \u00e0 tous les discours de se d\u00e9velopper sans contrainte; cela permet en r\u00e9alit\u00e9 au discours de contrainte de tenir en toute apparence vertueuse (aucune contrainte formelle) son rang, qui est \u00e9crasant sinon exclusif, et de se d\u00e9velopper avec efficacit\u00e9 pour garder Obama prisonnier, – d’autant plus qu’Obama y souscrit en grande partie et qu’il se croit libre. De ce point de vue, la d\u00e9mocratie s’av\u00e8re finalement le syst\u00e8me parfait pour faire perdurer un syst\u00e8me oppressif de la pens\u00e9e, d\u00e8s lors que ce syst\u00e8me a parfaitement assimil\u00e9 et incurgit\u00e9 \u00e0 son profit les r\u00e8gles de diffusion et d’entretien de la pens\u00e9e conformiste. Dans les conditions où nous sommes, la d\u00e9mocratie est le meilleur instrument du syst\u00e8me.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n (Pour illustrer le cas Obama, Porter d\u00e9veloppe justement l’analogie de John Kennedy, qui se trouvait effectivement dans une situation similaire, peut-\u00eatre avec une psychologie \u00ab\u00a0double\u00a0\u00bb assez proche. Le fait est que Kennedy a \u00e9chou\u00e9. Le fait est \u00e9galement qu’il y eut un \u00ab\u00a0accident\u00a0\u00bb, qui fut la crise de Cuba d’octobre 1962, qui conduisit Kennedy \u00e0 envisager de concert avec Krouchtchev des r\u00e9formes radicales pour tenter de desserrer l’\u00e9tau de la Guerre froide. Le fait est qu’on sait comment l’aventure s’est termin\u00e9e, pour les deux hommes d’ailleurs, – car les historiens devraient lier, par ce biais \u00e9galement, l’assassinat de Kennedy en novembre 1963 et l’\u00e9limination de Krouchtchev en octobre 1964.)<\/p>\n<\/p>\n Voici le texte de la transcription de l’interview de Gareth Porter par Pepe Escobar.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n PEPE ESCOBAR<\/em><\/strong>: I’m here in Washington with Gareth Porter, historian and author, and we’re going to talk about Iran, Iraq, Obama, McCain, and the ramifications of Obama and McCain’s foreign policy. Gareth, let’s start with the war in Iraq. After the invasion of Iraq in 2003, Iran emerges as the big regional power in Southwest Asia. The US gets rid of the Taliban in east of Iran and gets rid of Saddam Hussein west of Iran. Basically what Bush and McCain have been saying and preaching all along is that they will never accept it, the emergence of Iran as a big regional power. Obama, on the other hand, maybe we could say that he’s a following a tradition that starts with Truman, goes through Ronald Reagan, and gets to George Bush I. It’s basically a Cold War mentality. It’s American hegemony in the end. But at the same time, Obama wants to get rid of all US troops in Iraq, bring them back home. What are we facing here? Isn’t this an enormous contradiction, like Cold War mentality, being progressive and antiwar in the case of Iraq?<\/em><\/p>\n<\/p>\n GARETH PORTER<\/em><\/strong>: And the answer is both. And that’s because he is a contradictory figure in a political system which is profoundly dysfunctional in terms of what it produces on many fronts, but particularly on national security policy. I mean, this is a society that has long since lost—and arguably never had in the first place—the capacity to really have a serious debate about any national security issue, for the simple reason that the terms of any public discourse on national security are so heavily weighted in favor of the national security bureaucracy’s point of view that, you know, the media, news media, essentially carry only one side, and therefore only a small minority of people in the United States are going to have the opportunity to access a point of view that is different from the point of view of those people who’ve been making the wars of the past and still making the wars of the present. And therefore there’s no surprise here that someone who is as intelligent and in many ways as progressive as Obama is, you know, remarkably so within the context of the Democratic Party, let alone the political system in general, is a captive of what you call—and I think correctly so—Cold War mentality, that is to say, a mentality that begins with a whole set of assumptions that have very little to do with reality, particularly in the case of Iran, to suggest that, you know, Iran is a threat because of the allegations that have to do with Iraq or with the nuclear program that are not based on, you know, reality at all. You know, this is simply a function, for the most part, of where he gets his information, who advises him, and where they get their information. The whole system is completely tilted, so extremely tilted towards the warlike point of view, that even somebody who does have a great deal of intelligence, relatively speaking, and a desire to make change, relatively speaking, is hogtied, in a way, to try to do anything about it.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/p>\n ESCOBAR<\/em><\/strong>: So is Obama playing a very clever game here? Is he trying to play along the lines of a Cold War mentality, of an hegemonic US mentality?<\/em><\/p>\n<\/p>\n PORTER<\/em><\/strong>: I think there is definitely an aspect of his political strategy which is to position himself just to the left of McCain. This is almost standard issue Democratic Party electoral strategy, if you will. I mean, and it reminds me very much of John F. Kennedy, although Kennedy actually ran slightly to the right of Nixon, in fact, but the point being that Kennedy presented himself as much tougher against communism than he really was in his own understanding. And Kennedy hid the degree to which he was prepared to try to deemphasize the hostility to the Soviet Union, the degree to which he was interested in trying to find ways to reduce tensions with the Soviet Union, as well as with China, even. I think there’s a lot of that in Obama as well. I think that he has an understanding that does certainly transcend the extreme rhetoric, the extremes of rhetoric, which I think he’s been capable of in the past. On the other hand, I also think that he has a very limited capacity to imagine where we could go, where he could go, from where he is right now. In other words, I think his ability to sort of have an alternative policy that’s really meaningful in terms of calling for fundamental change is quite limited.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/p>\n ESCOBAR<\/em><\/strong>: So this means going against the Pentagonization of American life? And this is something that no American president can do?<\/em><\/p>\n<\/p>\n PORTER<\/em><\/strong>: It does. It means that he has to stand against a set of policies that have been embraced by the military services, by, you know, successive secretaries of defense and state, by national security advisors, the whole national security elite, which transcends party—you know, it’s got both Democratic and Republican parts to it, and they’re slightly different, but not very much different. And so, you know, the people who surround him, even though they may have their differences with the Bush administration—obviously they do have differences with it—are still going to be embracing a great deal of the assumptions of that national security elite. And let me give you an example, the one that’s, I find, most telling. I’ve been asking some of Obama’s advisers—really I started doing this some months ago—whether they would support a change of policy with regard to the whole idea of occupying Muslim countries, occupying Muslim lands. I asked them, shouldn’t an Obama administration take the position that the United States will no longer occupy Muslim lands, just as a basic principle, to present ourselves as really different, to present that government as different from the ones that had come before. None of them would say yes to that. They all sort of hemmed and hawed and found reasons why they really couldn’t say yes to the proposition that we shouldn’t occupy Muslim lands in the future, a commitment not to do that. And basically it comes down to, \u00ab\u00a0Well, you just don’t give up any options.\u00a0\u00bb And this is such a fundamental assumption, a fundamental plank of the national security elite in this country that nobody can sort of be a member of that elite and sort of renounce that principle.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/p>\n ESCOBAR<\/em><\/strong>: So what you’re saying is that basically it’s impossible for an American president to try to change the system from the inside.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/p>\n PORTER<\/em><\/strong>: I think that it probably is impossible to change the system from the inside. It would require a president who is ready to go down in flames on the basis of his understanding of what needs to be done, and the willingness to essentially defy his entire national security bureaucracy, which no president is going to do, because you’re not going to get elected having that sort of mentality.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/p>\n ESCOBAR<\/em><\/strong>: And American voters would never elect such a personality, character, and vision.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/p>\n PORTER<\/em><\/strong>: Exactly. This is too conservative a country to elect anybody that has that kind of vision.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/p>\n ESCOBAR<\/em><\/strong>: So this would explain why John McCain, who seems to be unprepared at all levels of governance, whatever he says and whatever he does, he has at least 41 to 45 percent of American voters.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/p>\n PORTER<\/em><\/strong>: Exactly. There’s an automatic 35 to 45 percent of the electorate that will support somebody who is viewed as being sort of warlike and tough without knowing anything else. That’s all they need to know, and essentially it plays into that bias in US culture, which is very fundamental.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Obama pourra-t-il s’\u00e9vader? 21 juillet 2008 — Nous avons d\u00e9couvert cette conversation entre deux analystes que nous appr\u00e9cions en g\u00e9n\u00e9ral, P\u00e9p\u00e9 Escobar et Gareth Porter. Escobar interroge l’historien Porter (vid\u00e9o et trancription sur The Real News Network [TRNN], le 18 juillet) sur un sujet d’un tr\u00e8s grand int\u00e9r\u00eat : «Obama and the Cold War mentality».… <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"neve_meta_sidebar":"","neve_meta_container":"","neve_meta_enable_content_width":"","neve_meta_content_width":0,"neve_meta_title_alignment":"","neve_meta_author_avatar":"","neve_post_elements_order":"","neve_meta_disable_header":"","neve_meta_disable_footer":"","neve_meta_disable_title":"","_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[4900,3106,3483,2645,1356,6208,6333,3014],"class_list":["post-70059","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-faits-et-commentaires","tag-escobar","tag-froide","tag-gorbatchev","tag-guerre","tag-kennedy","tag-obama","tag-porter","tag-systeme"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/new.dedefensa.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/70059","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/new.dedefensa.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/new.dedefensa.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/new.dedefensa.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/new.dedefensa.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=70059"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/new.dedefensa.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/70059\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/new.dedefensa.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=70059"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/new.dedefensa.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=70059"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/new.dedefensa.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=70059"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}\n
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Will Obama be truly post-Cold War?<\/em><\/strong><\/h3>\n<\/p>\n