L'Égypte: l'Iran d'Obama?

Ce n'est pas la première fois qu'un journaliste compare Obama à Jimmy Carter, un Président dont la réputation a gagné en crédibilité depuis qu'il est à la retraite! On associe les deux noms pour la "candeur" et la "naïveté" de leurs discours. Rappelons au passage que Carter, candidat surprise en 1976, ne complétera qu'un seul mandat et que sa présidence sera marquée par des problèmes économiques et le bourbier de l'Iran. Le journaliste Davis Hanson du National review online considère que l'Égypte de 2011 pourrait être pour Obama ce que l'Iran 1979 fut pour Carter. Une lecture qui n'est pas dénuée d'intérêt...

Un extrait:

"As the world began to heat up in the expectation that the new America either would not or could not play its old Cold War role, a contrite Carter now suddenly played catch-up by approving massive sales of jet aircraft to the dictatorships in Saudi Arabia and Egypt. He set in place what was to become the largest covert CIA operation in our history by supplying sophisticated weapons to radical Islamic fundamentalists in Afghanistan. He became the first American president to organize a boycott of a scheduled Olympics. By 1980 there was a “Carter Doctrine” that essentially declared, in neo-colonialist Monroe Doctrine fashion, that the oil-rich Persian Gulf was an American protectorate and that the United States would use military force to keep out foreign powers. Likewise Carter authorized a sudden build-up in U.S. defense capability; in his last budget, he sent defense expenditures spiraling above 5 percent of GDP.

The impression, fairly or not, was that the conversion of late 1979 and 1980 was a reaction to the misplaced policies of 1977–1978 — not so much a reaction to the domestic opposition of Republicans, but more a concession that the world simply did not operate in the manner Carter had hoped. The further impression was that if Carter had not so loudly denounced his predecessors and so rashly pronounced his own new wiser policies, then he might not have had to reject his own prior doctrines so utterly and embarrassingly, and seek so clumsily to restore U.S. deterrence."

Le lien pour l'article au complet: http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/print/258548