Love the rhetoric, admire the oratory: where’s the action?

When Barack Obama was elected president of the United States, many in the Middle East expected a dramatic change in Washington’s policy towards the region. It is now clear that those expectations were too high.

Mr Obama, as a powerful and eloquent orator, vowed to revamp America’s relationship with the Arab and Muslim worlds after the disastrous presidency of George W Bush. But Mr Obama as president has proven to be a hard-headed political realist who is reluctant to disrupt US alliances with the region’s many authoritarian rulers.

“No matter how callously defined, neither America’s interests – nor the world’s – are served by the denial of human aspirations,” the president declared in his acceptance speech for the Nobel Peace Prize. But one of the biggest disappointments of his administration so far is its failure to advance democracy and human rights, especially in the Middle East...

Mr Obama also took up the soaring oratory of democracy promotion in his speech to the Muslim world last year. “America does not presume to know what is best for everyone, just as we would not presume to pick the outcome of a peaceful election,” the president said in his much-anticipated address to the Arab world at Cairo University in June. “But I do have an unyielding belief that all people yearn for certain things: the ability to speak your mind and have a say in how you are governed; confidence in the rule of law and the equal administration of justice; government that is transparent and doesn’t steal from the people; the freedom to live as you choose. These are not just American ideas; they are human rights.”

Since that speech, the Obama administration has been remarkably quiet on democracy promotion and reluctant to criticise US allies who fall well short of the ideals about which he spoke so eloquently in Cairo. The administration has also dropped any threat of linking future US aid to democratic reform or improvements in, for example, Egypt’s human rights record (Mr Mubarak’s regime receives nearly $1.8 billion a year in US assistance, making it the second-highest beneficiary of American foreign aid after Israel).

Even in Iraq, the administration remained largely silent after a parliamentary committee barred a prominent Sunni leader, Saleh al Mutlaq, from national elections in March.

These policies, which Mr Obama and his aides regard as political realism, are viewed by many in the region as yet another example of the US favouring expediency over real change... http://www.thenational.ae/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20100120/OPINION/701199940/1080