We all Tunisians and Egyptians
Read the speeches of Barack Obama, Feb. 11, the evening of the fall of Hosni Mubarak. It is found on the site Whitehouse.gov. A speech more? In any case, a real moment of eloquence, as he loves the American president, a great reader of Abraham Lincoln. Egypt, Arab giant, had to switch, under the combined pressure of the democratic aspirations and a reversal of the military against the old rais.
Barack Obama has been standing behind a lectern on the steps of the White House. He was grave and composed. He did not have the tone of a conqueror. He spoke of Gandhi, Martin Luther King, the fall of the Berlin Wall and students from Indonesia who were demonstrating against Suharto once. One sentence in particular deserves attention: "In Egypt, it is the moral force of nonviolence - not terrorism or the killing senseless - which has once again tilted the arc of history towards justice " ," he said.
U.S. President was addressing the events of Cairo to anchor the peaceful uprising of young Arabs in a heroic lineage. In June 2009, in her Cairo speech, Obama sought to rehabilitate the image of the United States in the Muslim world, announcing a "new beginning" . Here it is, this 11 February, which seems dubbed a recipe for democratization, regime change, version "velvet revolutions".
He was demonstrating the futility of the ideology of Osama bin Laden to change things. He insisted: peaceful way is the solution. Quoting a phrase from Tahrir Square, he says a few words in Arabic, as he did in Cairo - and it is perhaps not as pedantry. "Selmiyya, selmiyya" we are peaceful.
This was a U.S. president seek a "narrative" effective against al Qaeda and others, against those who for years trying to capture the frustrations of Muslim youth by channeling them into fanaticism .
A question arises: Barack Obama will he invent his own "Freedom Agenda"? The expression is very connotations, and he himself does not definitely associate it in those terms. It comes from the second term of George W. Bush. In this period the commander of the war in Iraq was trying to forget that no weapon of destruction mass had been found on the side of Saddam Hussein. A stage where he must try to drape in theory for the entire "Greater Middle East" a recipe more presentable than the language of arms, and thereby trying to deprive Al Qaeda of ideological levers. But it was too late.
The "Freedom Agenda" Bush's failed Middle East, sinking into the crash of military operations and attacks in Iraq. Barack Obama finds himself ironically - he could not anticipate - in position to take over. In its way, and with many cautions language. Without giving any impression of "dictating" to others.
The spectacular eruption of Arab civil society has opened new horizons. Hillary Clinton has announced a strategy to build the great capacity of gathering on the Internet, social networks, a part of soft power American power through influence, not force.
Joseph Nye, the inventor of the formula soft power, Professor at Harvard, has theorized that. He wrote that in the information age, communication strategies become more important. The outcome a struggle, namely that of terrorism, can not be decided by the victory of arms but by the victory of a story. In the fight against Al Qaeda and its metastases, it is essential to have a "narrative" attractive to the vast majority to avoid recruitment by radical minds.
That's what, nine years after Sept. 11, Barack Obama seems to want to tackle, based on the Arabic Democratic wave, during which not a slogan anti-American, anti-Western nor anti-Israeli has been delivered. The strategy outlined by U.S. President we had thus described, in Washington, a member of his administration, just days after the speech of 11 February.
Osama bin Laden and his followers had to be stunned by what happened in Tunis and Cairo, we said this person: "Supporters of al-Qaeda have always seen t that, and they said : "We were not." Obama, speaking of non-violence, understood that. A crowd of Muslims, without religious slogans, demanding a government that is accountable and is serving the population was the most Chess for radical lunatics of jihad.
shame that Europe has no leader like the U.S. president welcomed openly and emphatically, that the advent of the younger generation of Facebook was a great Arab disapproval for the " narrative "of Islamic fundamentalists.
analysis had yet been made long ago that authoritarian regimes served as fertile ground for radicalism, not a bulwark. Take France. The researcher Olivier Roy wrote in 2005 in a report submitted to the Centre for Analysis and Prediction of the Quai d'Orsay : Middle East, "secular authoritarian regimes have failed" , "democratization is popular" in Arab opinion.
Or the text out of a group of French diplomats and academics called Avicenna, which analyzed in April 2007: "The Middle East is the only part of the world has known no real political change since the fall of the Wall. The same leaders (or their son) are in power, relied on patronage structures and repressive. " In these "companies blocked" , developmental delay helps "despair of the people, especially young and qualified people, and lack of prospects fueling talk of Al-Qaeda" .
Barack Obama has not guessed the imminence of the Arab uprisings, catalysts unpredictable. But once the changeover accomplished, he found words to say a "we are all Tunisians and Egyptians" . To Europe to follow?
Natalie Nougayrède
nougayrede@lemonde.fr
