Looking Ahead To The Cairo Speech
Looking Ahead To The Cairo Speech
Scott Carpenter, director of WINEP’s Project Fikra, on the president’s choice of Cairo for his address next week:
Led by an octogenarian who has been in power since Anwar Sadat’s assassination in 1981, Egypt persists as an authoritarian regime lacking any truly democratic institutions, making this speech Obama’s first delivered in a nondemocracy.This latter fact perhaps explains why White House spokesperson Robert Gibbs emphasized that the speech’s scope was “bigger than where the speech was going to be given or who is the leadership of the country,” during the press briefing announcing it.
This attempt at evasion, however, fails to fully address the downside of the choice of venue. There is no way for the president to travel to Egypt without providing implicit support for the Mubarak regime.
Marc Lynch, who voiced similar concerns about the venue, yesterday zeroed in on “the key question for Obama’s trip the region, his speech, and his strategic approach both to Iran and the Israeli-Arab tracks: Will he reinforce or challenge the ‘moderates vs resistance’ frame which he inherited from the Bush administration?”
The Arab leaders he has been meeting, like the Israelis, are perfectly comfortable with that approach, dividing the region between Israel and Arab “moderates” vs Iran and Arab “resistance” groups like Hamas and Hezbollah. That’s the easy path. If followed it is likely to fail badly, destroy the hopes for change which his engagement policy has raised, and leave the region right back where Bush left it. But I think — and hope — that Obama will not fall into that trap.
He has an opportunity over the next few weeks — with the unveiling of his approach to Israel and the Palestinians, the response to the Lebanese and Iranian elections, and his Cairo speech — to break down those tired, dangerous, and unpopular lines of division. And if he chooses to do that, to really challenge the unsustainable status quo, then Riyadh and Cairo are the right place to start.
Underlying all of these concerns, of course, is the disrepute into which the idea of democracy promotion has fallen in the region, in the wake of Bush’s failed freedom agenda — understandable, considering that the central showpiece for that agenda was the Iraq war.
In February, my colleague Brian Katulis published a paper encouraging the Obama administration to reclaim the mantle of democracy promotion, and laid out a strategy for doing that. Read it here (pdf).
4 Responses to “Looking Ahead To The Cairo Speech”
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The US has no business promoting a “democracy” agenda.
May 30th, 2009 at 11:19 amThe rule of law and the welfare of citizens should be first.
With the shape of democracy in this country, the US has no credibility when discussing democracy.
The paper to which we are provided with a link at the bottom- Democracy Promotion in the Middle East and the Obama Administration by Brian Katulis- carries helpful insights but, in my opinion, rests on two major assumptions that it never stops to examine.
Firstly, Katulis assumes that our American style of democracy as a system of governance supercedes all others present in the Middle East. But how do we valuate this implied assertion? Certainly I, as an American citizen, am just as pleased with the benefits accorded me as the next person. Still, this is not a reasoned basis for the export of our system into a culturally, historically different set of peoples, whatever the approach toward doing so may be.
Secondly, Katulis assumes that it is our responsibility create a global architecture in the way that makes most sense to us as Americans. Whether or not we take a “realist” approach or a “liberal internationalist” approach, or even an approach that is more nuanced than these two, we are still assuming that it is us, we, as Americans, who must create and maintain a world order, however that might manifest.
Ultimately, perhaps Katulis is correct in his assumptions. Still, I posit that simply by making these assumptions, we are missing excellent opportunities to understand the region and its peoples better. If, for a moment, we stop concerning ourselves over how to fix things and start listening to what it is that people are saying they want and need, it would, perhaps, enable us to act more as friends than as patriachs. For even if the Obama Administration were the most liberal in its regional decrees, it would still be playing the high hand.
And why? Is it because we are the wealthiest? The most militaristically powerful? The nexus of international trade, and so on? These are admirable things, but I suggest that they do not give us any sort of privilage other than the capacity to help so long as we are willing to listen.
I am so far encouraged by the Obama administration’s work with the Palestinian authority. But if we can shirk the notion that we are somehow better than other peoples, maybe then we could start to listen to Hamas as well, and thereby make real progress toward peace in the region.
Afterall, isms don’t talk to isms. People talk to people.
May 30th, 2009 at 1:14 pmIm not so sure we have democracy in America anymore what with all the lobbyists buying votes from politicians for special interest causes.
May 30th, 2009 at 1:28 pmIs Democracy really a good thing for Egypt?
One of the major opposition parties blocked by the Egyptian Government is the Muslim Brotherhood. While Egypts Copts and other minorities don’t exactly enjoy absolute freedom, under the Muslim Brotherhood’s rule they would be extremely oppressed. They have links to violence against Women and their opposition.
So now you have to ask yourself. Is Democracy really Democracy when it leads to an oppressive Theocratic state? A Democratic society isn’t really a Democracy until the rights of Minorities and Women are guaranteed and put into practice.
May 31st, 2009 at 3:53 pm