The deflated Arab hopes for Obama
By Jackson Diehl
Monday, November 30, 2009
It's been nearly six months
since Barack Obama stirred hearts and raised hopes across much of the
Arab world with his much-promoted Cairo address. Many came
away from it expecting a new and more vigorous U.S. attempt to settle
the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Others hoped for more American
sympathy and support for liberal reform in countries where free
_expression_, women's rights and democratic elections are blocked by
entrenched autocracies.
The peace-process bubble burst
two months ago at the United Nations, when Obama's poorly executed
attempt to launch final-settlement talks between Israelis and
Palestinians collapsed. Arabs who were
led by Obama's rhetoric to believe that the United States would force
Israel to make unprecedented unilateral concessions -- like a complete
end to all construction in Jerusalem -- were bitterly disappointed.
But they are not the only
victims of post-Cairo letdown. Arab reformers, who for most of this
decade have been trying to break down the barriers to social and
political modernization in the Middle East, have also begun to conclude
that the Obama administration is more likely to harm than to help them.
"All Arab countries are craving
change -- and many of us believed Obama was a tool for change," says
Aseel al- Awadhi, a Kuwaiti member of parliament. "Now we are losing
that hope."
Awadhi, one of four women
elected to Kuwait's parliament this year, is part of a movement that
the Bush administration loudly promoted and sporadically attempted to
help -- though the effort steadily waned during George W. Bush's second
term. The Obama administration, in contrast, often speaks as if it does
not recognize the existence of an Arab reform movement. Bush's
frequently articulated argument that political and social
liberalization offer the best antidote to Islamic extremism appears
absent from this administration's thinking.
"People in Jordan are beginning
to understand that the United States will not play the same role as
under the old administration on democracy," said Musa Maaytah, Jordan's
minister of political development -- who, like Awadhi, visited
Washington recently for a conference sponsored by the National
Endowment for Democracy. "People think that the U.S. has many issues
that for it are a priority, and they prefer to have stability in these
countries more than democracy."
For the reformers, a big signal
came this month in a speech Secretary of State Hillary Rodham
Clinton delivered in Marrakech, Morocco. Clinton was attending a
session of the Forum for the Future, a body the Bush administration
established at the height of its pro-reform campaign. The idea was to
foster a dialogue between Western and Arab countries about political
and social reform that would resemble the Helsinki process between the
West and the Soviet bloc during the 1970s.
Clinton began her speech by
referring to Obama's call in Cairo for "a new beginning between the
United States and Muslim communities around the world." She then said
that after consulting with "local communities" the administration had
"focused on three broad areas where we believe U.S. support can make a
difference."
These turned out to be
"entrepreneurship," "advancing science and technology" and education.
As if citing the also-rans, Clinton added that "women's empowerment"
was "a related priority" and that "the United States is committed to a
comprehensive peace in the Middle East." The word "democracy" appeared
nowhere in the speech, and there was no reference at all to the Arabs
who are fighting to create independent newspapers, political parties or
human rights organizations.
Saad Eddin Ibrahim, an Egyptian
who is one of the best-known Arab reformers, was part of a group who
met Clinton after the speech. He told me that he tried to point out to
her that "the next two years are crucial" for determining the political
direction of the Middle East, in part because Egypt is approaching a
major transition. Parliamentary elections are scheduled in 10 months,
and their results will determine whether a presidential election
scheduled for 2011 will be genuinely democratic. Hosni Mubarak, Egypt's
82-year-old ruler, is under pressure to retire; if he allows it, a
truly competitive race to succeed him could pit his son Gamal against
diplomatic heavyweights such as former foreign minister Amr Moussa and
Mohamed ElBaradei, the outgoing head of the International Atomic Energy
Agency -- not to mention Ayman Nour, who was imprisoned for three years
after challenging Mubarak in 2005.
Clinton, said Ibrahim, replied
that democracy promotion had always been a centerpiece of U.S.
diplomacy and that the Obama administration would not give it up --
"but that they have a lot of other things on their plate." For Arab
liberals, the translation is easy, if painful: Regardless of what the
president may have said in Cairo, Obama's vision for the Middle East
doesn't include "a new beginning" in the old political order.
