During his campaign, President Barack Obama pledged to deliver a major address from a Muslim capital early in his presidency as part of his administration’s olive branch to the Muslim world. The Washington Post reports that he will make good on that promise not from Beirut or Jakarta, but from Cairo, Egypt, the largest Arab country and home to one in three Arabs.
Realist critics of George W. Bush’s “freedom agenda” will no doubt applaud the decision. So too, of course, will the government of Egypt, a fading regional heavyweight whose once warm relationship with Washington began to fray under the weight of the Bush administration’s democracy promotion. But while the Pyramids of Giza or minarets of Al Azhar may make for a great backdrop to the president’s speech, it is the very people he seeks to address who will have the least reason to celebrate.
In rushing to ingratiate itself with autocrats and engage U.S. adversaries, the Obama administration has kicked natural U.S. allies to the curb. Bringing in Bashar al-Assad from the cold and cozying up to Hugo Chavez may make Obama the anti-Bush, but it does nothing to empower those dissidents who chafe under their despotic rule. Indeed, one of the primary reasons the United States finds itself almost universally loathed throughout the wider Middle East has been its past and present sponsorship of the region’s unsavory potentates.
White House spokesman Robert Gibbs was quick to point out that the choice of Cairo did not imply endorsement of the Mubarak regime. But that assurance is meaningless. Strongmen crave legitimacy, which is precisely what the unpopular Mubarak—busy choreographing a hereditary succession as he prepares to enter his fourth decade in power—will gain by receiving the honor of feting Obama.
It was only a few years ago that the seeds of democracy appeared to be planted in Egypt, a country to whom we give $1.8 billion annually. I was living in Cairo when Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice visited the American University there in 2005 and exhorted the Egyptian government “to put its faith in its own people” and “abandon the excuses that are made to avoid the hard work of democracy.” For a time, Mubarak appeared to do just that, but he retreated to his authoritarian ways when U.S. pressure subsided. Many Egyptians subsequently blamed Bush not for applying the heat, but for not applying it hard enough.
Perhaps Obama could be excused for choosing Cairo if he did not appear as eager as his Egyptian counterpart to roll the clock back to the pre-9/11 status quo, when the bilateral security partnership (and the largesse that came with it) trumped all other considerations. Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates recently told a press conference in Cairo that the $1.3 billion in annual military assistance to Egypt, long seen as a possible lever for reform, “should be without conditions. And that is our sustained position.” If the Mubarak regime needed any further proof that it will get carte blanche in the years ahead, the Obama administration recently agreed, at its behest, to no longer funnel economic aid to civil society organizations not sanctioned by the government. All of which prompts the question: Is this the change the Muslim world is supposed to believe in?