Published: June 4 2009 19:40 | Last updated: June 4 2009 19:40
When George W. Bush made his last visit to the Middle East he was greeted with a volley of shoes, a mark of contempt that measured with lamentable accuracy the level to which America’s reputation had sunk in the region during his eight long years in power.
Barack Obama, in his speech on Thursday to the Arab and Muslim worlds from Cairo University, arrived to a standing ovation and left to rapturous applause. He has started a new conversation. While all now depends on what the US does rather than what its president says, Mr Obama has changed the tone of relations between the west and the world of Islam.
The speech was brilliant. With artful sensitivity he navigated through minefields littered with cultural explosive devices and politico-religious booby-traps, dodging ambushes without evading the issues. He was so word-perfect that his one slip – mispronouncing hijab – must have been a teleprompter error.
He made it plain to the differing constituencies in his audience that he gets it, exhibiting a sketched but deep appreciation of the past and of recent history that brought relations to where they are now.
He spoke a language of aspiration: tailored to the young, who typically amount to between half and two-thirds of the populations of Arab and Muslim countries; to women; and to a thirst for freedom. This was not Nixon in China, it was Kennedy in Berlin.
In his pledge to fight crude stereotypes of Muslims, and his plea against stereotyping of Americans, he recalled the ideals of the republic in which Arabs had placed such hope because it stood against colonialism. “We were born out of revolution against an empire,” he reminded his audience.
Mr Obama offered no quarter to jihadi extremists whose murderous activity is “irreconcilable with the rights of human beings, the progress of nations and with Islam”. But he distinguished clearly between the war of necessity that brought US troops to Afghanistan and the war of choice that led to the debacle in Iraq, which he believed reminded the US of the value of diplomacy and building consensus to resolve problems. Quoting Thomas Jefferson, he said: “I hope that our wisdom will grow with our power, and teach us that the less we use our power the greater it will be.”
Announcing a (hopefully) orderly pull-back from Iraq, he said “we pursue no bases, and no claim on their territory or resources. Iraq’s sovereignty is its own.”
The president laid out clearly why US bonds with Israel are unbreakable. But in language seldom, if ever, heard from an American leader, he said that “just as Israel’s right to exist cannot be denied, neither can Palestine’s”.
Reiterating what he recently told Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel’s prime minister, who refuses to rein in colonisation of occupied Palestinian land or back a two-states solution, the president said “the United States does not accept the legitimacy of continued Israeli settlements”. His implicit comparison of the “intolerable” situation of the Palestinians under “occupation” with the struggles of African slaves in America and South African blacks under apartheid will signal to the irredentist right in Israel and the Likudnik lobby in the US that they are dealing with someone who means business.
But what all parties in this enduring conflict will now be watching intently is the test of wills between Mr Obama and Mr Netanyahu: to see who blinks first.
The president gave a nuanced defence of democratic rights that, while distinct from the discredited neo-conservative conviction that America and its allies could bomb the region into a better future, was uncompromisingly on the side of freedom and the rule of law. Formally banned though elected members of the Muslim Brotherhood, in the audience at US insistence, certainly understood that, greeting those remarks with whoops of applause. When Condoleezza Rice set out Mr Bush’s “freedom agenda” in Cairo four years ago, she expressly ruled out any contact with the Brothers.
Hopefully, they and mainstream Islamists elsewhere will also have understood Mr Obama’s caveats that power should be exercised through consent, tolerance, compromise and respect for minorities and other religious beliefs.
But what the peoples of the broader Middle East will also want to know is whether the US will continue to collude with despotic regimes. Decades of support for local tyrants, every bit as much as unconditional backing for Israel, is what has most inflated Islamist appeal. That is something “realists” should really think about.
No comments:
Post a Comment