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Sol Sanders Archive
Wednesday, May 13, 2009

[Cecil B. De Mille] Axelrod and teleprompter head to Egypt for a [dangerous] PR-op

Sol Sanders also writes the "Asia Investor" column weekly for EAST-ASIA-INTEL.com.

The announcement from the White House that President Obama will make his long promised seminal speech to the Muslim world in Cairo next month is another Administration venture into form over substance.   

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But this time it risks throwing more oil on the always smoldering Mideast fires.

The message that “the U.S. is not at war with Islam”, a worldwide Abrahamic religion which shares much with the rest of the world’s other main faiths, is, of course, always in order. Obama made that statement clearly in his visit to Turkey a few weeks ago. Whether it resonated with Ankara’s so-called moderate Muslim government with its overweaning aspirations to play a regional role probably beyond it, its impact beyond was minimal.

The appeal of the President – as with other Western leaders exemplified in part by the current visit of the Pope to the Holy Land – is one that is directed at something upwards of a billion and a half people. From Morocco to the Philippines, Obama’s audience is as disparate – for all the talk of the unity of the umma, the Muslim believers – as world society itself. For, indeed, the President also would be speaking to that growing and significant minority of Muslims who live in the West and who are under enormous pressure from the Islamicists to join their radical ranks – even their terrorist activities.

It’s not hard to understand why the Obama Administration’s PR practitioners have chosen Egypt as the platform for their extravaganza. Cairo has historically been the intellectual center of the Muslim world as well as considered the Arab heartland. The Nile Valley’s pre-Islamic past from the beginnings of history have created a fascination for everything Egyptian as for few other countries. With its more than 80 million people, their rapid growth rate [more1.7 percent annually], its abysmal poverty, its authoritarian regime, its special relationship with the Jewish state with whom it is formally at peace [unlike most of its neighbors], it does seem to be the ideal spot to announce some new Obama doctrine.

The question is, of course, what?

It is not as though the idea of proclaiming American empathy and dedication to working with the Islamic world was not already a fixture of this Administration. Indeed, the whole exercise has been tried before – if on a minor scale. Only two years ago in Cairo, Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice gave a speech of outreach – although directed primarily to Egypt and the Arabs. It even contained the kind of mea culpa for mistaken American past policies which has become the hallmark for Obama’s utterances abroad. Rice apologized with:

“For 60 years, the United States pursued stability at the expense of democracy in the Middle East — and we achieved neither.

“Now, we are taking a different course. We are supporting the democratic aspirations of all people.”

Therein lay the rub. Rice explicitly came down hard on the repressive policies of the regime of her host, Egyptian President Hosni Mubarrak, and also alluded to other less than democratic regimes in the area. She defended human rights activists often jailed by these same regimes.

Whatever else the speech did or did not do, it created new tensions in the relations between Washington and Cairo. It caused heartburn for the Mubarak regime – especially when it was followed up with token cuts in the massive American aid program [an annual average of over $2 billion in economic and military foreign assistance since 1979.]

Needless to say, the two years since have been eventful, not only for the U.S., the rest of the world, the Mideast, but also for Egypt.

Again, there is not yet any public clue as to what Obama intends to say to that audience. Obviously, he means to underline the fact – almost daily repeated by some Administration or U.S. spokesman somewhere in the world – that in Afghanistan [and Iraq], Washington is at war with Islamofascists, not with the religion of Islam or its peace abiding majority.

But it seems unlikely that Obama can make this pitch – any more than Rice could at that time – without an appeal to the domestic opponents in Muslim countries of their authoritarian governments. For it is those governments – not the least among them, Saudi Arabia, with its guardianship of the Muslim holy places – which not only represent continued oppression, but often subsidize or permit the kind of Islamicist radical evangelization which is the background of terrorism.

Much as one can imagine how David [Cecil B. De Mille] Axelrod salivates at the possibility of a spectacle of tens of thousands of Egyptians roaring their approval of a chin-out Obama declaiming from his portable teleprompter on the past glories of Islam and the need for a modern renovation in concert with the Western world, the project is fraught.

Just as no one noticed that the famous Berlin campaign speech was given before a memorial to Prussian militarism and aggression and an audience heavily larded with young Americans abroad, that kind of TV drama would play well on an U.S. media still glued to the President’s every word. But just as Rice felt it incumbent on her to speak of the necessity to move on to new governance in the Arab world, Obama can hardly neglect the subject of reform and modernization as part of any appeal for understanding and avoidance of “the clash of civilizations.” That bodes ill for relations with the Sunni Establishment now more than ever seeing itself under seige.

These two years in the Mideast have been a long time. The quarter century of Mubarrak’s rule faces new challenges. After the modest improvement of the economy and for most Egyptians during the boom years, it now faces, along with the rest of the world, a recession. Tourism, oil and gas revenues, Suez Canal receipts, foreign investment, all are going to reduce the growth rate to half what it has been in recent years.

It will afford new opportunities for Mubarrak’s domestic critics. The principal opposition – the formidable Moslem Brotherhood – is half “in” and half “out”. Were there to be free elections in Egypt, most observers believe, they might succeed in rousting the coalition of interests held tenuously together by Mubarak’s personallized regime based on his standing in good stead as a former military officer. And whatever above the ground Brotherhood spokesmen say, the organization has a long history of association with the worst aspects of terrorism, having invented modern political assassination in the 1920s. Nor has the 82-year-old Mubarrak’s campaign for succession of his son, Gamal, gone all that well.

But more important, simply by appearing in Egypt, Obama will emphasize – not minimize – the growing new threat to stability in the region: the possession of nuclear weapons by Iran.

That Benjamin Netanyahu is making a trip to Cairo before going to Washington for his first visit with Obama in mid-May – after Mubarrak’s secret police chief spent several days with the new Israeli government in Jerusalem – is telltale of the main preoccupations of the region. Not only is Egypt the principal political bridge the Israelis have managed with their Arab neighbors [including relying on it for substantial natural gas], but it is clear that recent domestic actions by Mubarak are making the two tacit allies against Tehran. The Egyptians moved not only to curb the Lebanese Shia Iranian Hizbullah’s surrogate duties as arms conduit for Tehran to Hamas in Gaza, but the Egyptian government has cracked down on the Lebanese organization’s network inside Cairo’s politics. That Hizbullah/Tehran has been able to reach across the Shia-Sunni divide to Hamas, which started life as the Gaza Wing of the [Egyptian] Moslem Brotherhood, is the stuff of Mideast politics today.

Nor can Obama’s use of the Cairo platform be seen as anything but an emphasis on the role of the Sunni Establishment in most of the Arab and Moslem countries. In a sense it hones Tehran’s attempt to use the longtime Shia minorities in Saudi Arabia and the Persian Gulf sheikhdoms, as well as Iraq. That the always flexible Qatar sheikh with his Al Jazeera weapon against other Arab/Muslim regimes has recently been siding with Iran and Syria is a Tehran’s talisman in this complicated game.

Obama’s oration, too, is likely to coincide with an ever deepening crisis in Afghanistan and Pakistan where the fight against the terrorists has reached a fever pitch, and where it is muddled by the crosscurrents of tribal, linguistic and ethnic divisions. Oratorical skills, notwithstanding, the American president is tempting fate with an enterprise which – as so often happens with U.S. propaganda ploys – is more “mirror imaging” than effective against an enemy as proficient in propaganda as he is in guerrilla warfare.


Sol W. Sanders, (solsanders@cox.net), is an Asian specialist with more than 25 years in the region, and a former correspondent for Business Week, U.S. News & World Report and United Press International. He writes weekly for World Tribune.com and East-Asia-Intel.com.

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