Les échecs de propagande

Un peu comme le projet raté d'ingénieurie sociale en décollage capitaliste en Afghanistan, les USA ont aussi pu rencontrer les mêmes genres de problèmes en Indonésie en 2001-2008, en tentant de créer un Islam libéral :

Hundreds of Indonesian clerics went through U.S.-sponsored courses that taught a reform-minded reading of the Koran. A handbook for preachers, published with U.S. money, offered tips on what to preach. One American-funded Muslim group even tried to script Friday prayer sermons.

(...)

"We wanted to challenge hard-line ideas head-on," recalled Ulil Abshar Abdalla, an Indonesian expert in Islamic theology who, with Asia Foundation funding, set up the Liberal Islam Network in 2001. The network launched a weekly radio program that questioned literal interpretations of sacred texts with respect to women, homosexuals and basic doctrine. It bought airtime on national television for a video that presented Islam as a faith of "many colors" and distributed leaflets promoting liberal theology in mosques.

Feted by Americans as a model moderate, Abdalla was flown to Washington in 2002 to meet officials at the State Department and the Pentagon, including Paul D. Wolfowitz, the then-deputy secretary of defense and a former U.S. ambassador to Jakarta. But efforts to transplant Cold War tactics into the Islamic world started to go very wrong. More-conservative Muslims never liked what they viewed as American meddling in theology. Their unease over U.S. motives escalated sharply with the start of the Iraq war and spread to a wider constituency. Iraq "destroyed everything," said Abdalla, who started getting death threats.

Indonesia's council of clerics, enraged by what it saw as a U.S. campaign to reshape Islam, issued a fatwa denouncing "secularism, pluralism and liberalism."

Les USA semblent renoncer clairement depuis à une intrusion aussi directe. C'est la difficulté d'une "Hégémonie" actuelle : les autorités américaines ont une puissance immense (notamment financière, technologique et militaire) mais se retrouvent très vite face à des limites dans ce qu'ils peuvent faire dans ces sociétés sur lesquelles ils veulent agir.