Obama has got it wrong

Barry Rubin

Cairo speech has left Islamists gloating

Barack Obama’s speech in Cairo is one of the most bizarre orations ever made by a US President, not a foreign policy statement but rather something invented by him, an international campaign speech, as if his main goal was to obtain votes in the next Egyptian election.

That approach defined Mr Obama’s basic themes: Islam is great. America is good. We are sorry. Be moderate (not that you haven’t always been that way). Let us be friends.

Here, he followed the idea that if you want someone to like you, agree with almost everything he says. Mr Obama also gave, albeit with some minor variations, a speech that the leader of a Third World Muslim country might give, justifying it in advance by claiming America is a big Muslim country, after all.

Of course, the speech had tremendous — though temporary — appeal combined with its counter-productive strategic impact. It will make him more popular. It may well make America somewhat less unpopular. But its effect on West Asian issues and American interests is another matter entirely.

The first problem is that Mr Obama said many things factually quite untrue, some ridiculously so. Pages would be required to list all these inaccuracies. The interesting question is whether he consciously lied or really believes it. I’d prefer him to be lying, because if he’s that ignorant then America and the world is in very deep trouble.

If he really believes Islam’s social role is so perfect, radical Islamists are a tiny minority, Palestinians have suffered hugely through no fault of their own, and so on, then he’s living in a fantasy world. Unfortunately, we are not. The collision between reality and dream is going to be a terrible one.

The second problem is the speech’s unnecessarily extreme one-sidedness. Mr Obama portrays the West as the guilty party. Despite a reference to September 11 — even that presented as an American misdeed, unfair dislike of Islam resulting in it — he gave not a single example of Islamist or Muslim responsibility for anything wrong in the world.

He could easily have made the same points in a balanced way: You’ve made mistakes; we’ve made mistakes. You’ve done things to us; we’ve done things to you. And having established that, I respect you, let me tell you how Americans feel and what’s needed.

But that’s not how he chose to do it. So afraid was Mr Obama of giving offence — and thus not maximising his popularity-at-all-costs mission — he did the political equivalent of scoring a self-goal. President Bill Clinton said, “I feel your pain.” In effect, Mr Obama declared, “We’re your pain.”

So if Muslims are always the innocent victims, isn’t Osama bin Laden and others correct in saying that all the violence and terrorism to date has been just a “defensive jihad” against external aggression and thus justifiable? Why should anything change simply because Mr Obama has ‘admitted’ this and asked to start all over again?

When he cited examples of oppression, Mr Obama listed only Bosnia (where he didn’t even mention the US role in helping Muslims), along with Israel, and also the Muslim-on-Muslim violence in Darfur. He didn’t mention terrorist violence and mistreatement of non-Muslims by Muslims in Indonesia, Thailand, the Philippines, Pakistan, India, Iraq, Sudan, the Gaza Strip, Israel, Europe or even Egypt itself.

This is a hallmark of the kind of thinking dominating much contemporary Western thought, extending something that works in their own societies — where self-criticism, apology, and unilateral concessions really can lead to the other side forgiving and compromising — to places where it doesn’t work.

The main ingredient in the Obama speech was flattery. There is a bumper sticker that says: ‘Don’t apologise. Your friends don’t need to hear it and your enemies don’t care’. Mr Obama’s situation might be described as: Don’t grovel. It scares the hell out of your friends and convinces your enemies you owe them big time. As a result, the mainstream in the region will say, “We were right all the time. Mr Obama admitted it!” While more extreme radicals say, “We’ve won and America’s surrendering.”

But if Mr Obama, as it appears, is running to be the region’s favourite politician, he’ll find he — not to mention America’s allies — has to give up many more things to win that dubious honour.

Third, Mr Obama undermined the existing states. True, to his credit, he did talk about reform, democracy, and equal rights for women. Yet what the speech suggests to listeners is: Democracy plus Islam equals solution. If Islam is so perfect — except for a tiny minority of extremists — why shouldn’t it rule? And since the extremists are presumably Al Qaeda, Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood parliamentarians in the audience must have found a lot to applaud. How will this go with the rulers Mr Obama wants as allies?

Finally, he played into the stereotype that Israel is the central political issue in the region. Others, of course, are happy to find the usual scapegoat. An Associated Press headline reads, “Obama’s Islam Success Depends on Israel.” Is the entire ‘Muslim world’ just waiting for Israel to stop building a few thousand apartment units a year before deciding that America is great, reform is needed, and moderation wise?

(The writer is director of the GLORIA Center, Jerusalem, and editor of the MERIA journal. His latest books are The Israel-Arab Reader and The Truth About Syria.)