Obama's Cairo mission: Don't be Bush

FWIW, this writer is good...

Obama's Cairo mission: Don't be Bush

Five disastrous Middle East policies that the president must show he's rejected.

By Gary Kamiya


June 4, 2009 | These are momentous days in the Middle East. As President Barack Obama arrives in Cairo to deliver a long-awaited speech addressing relations between America and the Arab/Muslim world, no fewer than four significant events loom on the regional horizon. On June 7, Lebanon will hold elections that could give the militant group Hezbollah unprecedented political power. Iran will hold its elections five days later, with the political fate of hard-line president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad hanging in the balance. U.S. combat forces are scheduled to leave all Iraqi cities by the end of June, the first tangible step toward ending the American military presence there. And Obama has just handed right-wing Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu a July deadline to form a new peace policy.

Under George W. Bush, America's Arab/Muslim report card was an F-minus. U.S. standing in the Middle East and among the world's Muslims sank to an all-time low, terrorist attacks greatly increased, violent extremists gained power, moderate and pro-U.S. regimes were weakened, the crucial Israeli-Palestinian conflict grew ever more intractable, Iraq sank into a hell from which it has only now begun to emerge, and the Taliban surged back in Afghanistan and threatened Pakistan. Bush's policies were directly responsible for many of these calamitous outcomes, and exacerbated others. In his Cairo speech, Obama's most pressing need is thus to make it unequivocally clear to the world's 1.5 billion Muslims and 325 million Arabs that the U.S. has decisively rejected Bush's failed ideology and policies, and intends to chart a completely new path. We can expect Obama to invoke his own background, reject the idea of a "clash of civilizations" and make an inspiring appeal to shared values. Those oratorical flourishes will count for something, but unless he supports them with tough, realistic language and actual policy changes, they will just go down as pretty words.

What follows is a list of Bush's five cardinal Middle East errors, and what Obama can do in his speech and in his subsequent actions to correct them.

Bush Sin 1: His egregiously pro-Israel tilt. Abandoning even the pretense of being an honest broker in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, Bush told his Cabinet at the very beginning of his administration that he intended to opt out and unleash Ariel Sharon on the Palestinians -- and then he did. Like it or not, the Palestinian cause is the unifying one for the world's Arabs and Muslims, and the West's abject failure to act justly toward the Palestinians has done more damage to its image in the Arab/Muslim world than anything else. Bush took that phenomenon to new depths. The justified perception that Washington was completely in Tel Aviv's pocket poisoned everything the U.S. tried to do in the region, from promoting democracy to fighting in Iraq to winning hearts and minds. Blind U.S. support for Israel enrages ordinary Arabs and Muslims, gives militant groups like Hezbollah and Hamas a raison d'être, and undercuts U.S. allies like Egypt whose oppressed people see their sclerotic leaders as paid-off water carriers for America.

Obama's antidote: He has made a good start by making it clear to the far-right Netanyahu government that the U.S. will no longer tolerate Israel's usual tricks of stalling and equivocating on freezing the settlements. The settlements are not the key issue in resolving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, but stopping their growth is essential if peace is to be realized because they are a prima facie sign of Israeli bad faith. Neither the Palestinians nor any Arab country will begin negotiations with Israel until the settlements, which have relentlessly grown during the entire so-called peace process initiated by Oslo in 1993, are frozen. Obama should make it clear in his speech that he has told the Israeli government that it must freeze the settlements and that he expects them to comply, thus publicly locking himself into a position from which he cannot back down and increasing pressure on the Netanyahu government to take action.

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http://www.salon.com/opinion/kamiya/2009/06/04/obama_egypt/