In early 2009, Barack Obama made a speech in Cairo entitled ‘A New Beginning’. Billed as a new Democratic president’s attempt to reshape the relations between the US and the Middle East after eight years of a fiercely interventionist foreign policy masterminded by George Bush, the speech was largely welcomed by the Arab world.
“I know there are many — Muslim and non-Muslim — who question whether we can forge this new beginning,” Obama said, speaking in Al Azhar University, one of the region’s most celebrated centres of learning. “Some are eager to stoke the flames of division, and to stand in the way of progress. Some suggest that it isn’t worth the effort — that we are fated to disagree, and civilisations are doomed to clash.
“Many more are simply sceptical that real change can occur. There’s so much fear, so much mistrust that has built up over the years. But if we choose to be bound by the past, we will never move forward. And I want to particularly say this to young people of every faith, in every country — you, more than anyone, have the ability to reimagine the world, to remake this world.”
Obama’s speech came against the backdrop of US-led campaigns in Iraq and Afghanistan, which not only brought relations between America and this region to an all-time low, but also won domestic opprobrium and burdened the national exchequer. According to research carried out at Brown University, a decade of fighting in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan have cost the US and its allies an estimated $4 trillion, with around 300,000 — military and civilian — deaths.
The reality is that the high hopes that the Arab world had for Obama after his Cairo speech back in 2009 have largely dissipated. Recent research carried out by the US-based Pew Research Centre, which measured global attitudes towards the Democrat incumbent over the past three years, prove that he has largely failed to live up to expectations. In terms of the five countries in the Muslim world — Egypt, Lebanon, Jordan, Turkey and Pakistan — that have been regularly polled by Pew since 2008, all of them have shown a steady drop in confidence over Obama’s leadership.
In Pakistan, for example, where drone attacks, cross-border raids and the assassination of Osama Bin Laden have complicated the US relationship with what was once a key strategic ally, confidence in Obama now sits at seven percent — exactly the same result as George Bush garnered at the end of his term in 2008. Respondents from the five nations universally preferred Obama to his predecessor, with the gap being widest in Egypt (42 percent saying that they had a lot/some confidence in Obama compared to eleven percent for Bush), Jordan (31 percent to seven percent) and Turkey (33 percent to two percent).
The biggest drop in opinion over Obama’s presidency has come in Egypt, which is down by thirteen percent over the three years, followed by Turkey (nine percent) and Jordan (also nine percent).
So what has caused the breakdown in the relationship? One factor has been that despite all the promises, US foreign policy has remained largely the same in the period since Obama was elected. While the US has now pulled out of Iraq, as promised, the war in Afghanistan has been widened due to a ‘surge’ — an additional 33,000 troops that have only just been drawn down. In addition, a promise to close Guantanamo Bay — the prison on US sovereign territory in Cuba that houses prisoners that the US suspects to be linked to Al Qaeda — has not been met.
But of more concern will be the US reaction to the Arab Spring. Some observers felt that America was too tied to dictators that were overthrown last year. In particular, the US, along with other Western powers, aligned itself strategically with former president Hosni Mubarak, even during the face of the nationwide protests that eventually toppled him. Despite the fact that Obama eventually went against counsel from his advisers and telephoned Mubarak, advising him to step down, American handling of the 2011 revolutions often seemed to be behind the curve.
In Libya, the US won a degree of credit by acting swiftly in the wake of Muammar Gaddafi’s move to crush the rebellion focused around the western city of Benghazi. Obama’s role in constructing a small coalition that swiftly implemented a no-fly zone may have saved thousands of civilian lives, and contributed heavily towards Gaddafi’s downfall. However, the recent death of the US ambassador to Libya, Christopher Stevens, has been politically damaging, especially as Republicans have tried to position the incident as a failure by the State Department to act on advice.
Article continued on next page
On the other side of the coin, Obama has also been criticised for a lack of intervention in Syria. You could argue that the president has been vilified for whatever action he has chosen to take with regard to the post-Arab Spring Middle East, but none of his policies — with the exception of the assassination of Bin Laden — have won him praise either domestically or here in the region.
Another reason for mistrust is undoubtedly the Obama administration’s handling of the Palestinian question. In his Cairo speech, the president made clear demarcation lines, stating that the US did not accept the legitimacy of continued Israeli settlements, and pointing out that settlement building must stop.
But in the years since the speech was made, and despite robust rhetoric from Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, US policy has had zero effect on the Israeli policy of continued settlement in large parts of the West Bank. The administration has made several attempts to secure a freeze, eventually winning a ten-month hiatus on construction which began in November 2009. However, four months later — during a visit to Israel by US vice president Joe Biden — the Jewish state announced that it was building over a thousand new units in East Jerusalem, and countless more homes have been built since then.
As a result, the Israeli-Palestinian peace initiative is dead in the water. The fact that Obama and Netanyahu are believed to dislike each other — a point underlined by what can only be described as an endorsement on the part of the latter for Mitt Romney — matters little. Instead, it now looks like Obama’s 2009 comments on the Israeli-Palestinian situation was nothing more than callow optimism.
But even given Obama’s record in the Middle East, it seems likely that most Arabs would prefer the Democrat to stay in office for the next four years. The reason? His challenger, the Republican party’s Mitt Romney. A former governor of Massachusetts, Romney was forced to swing to the right during the Republican primaries in order to secure his party’s nomination, and his lack of foreign policy experience was telling on a recent visit to Europe and Israel.
On that occasion, Romney — who worked with Netanyahu at the company the former set up, Bain Capital — called for Jerusalem to be named capital of the Jewish state, drew parallels between Israeli and Palestinian GDP per capita and implied that the latter were culturally inferior to the former.
“As you come here and you see the [GDP] per capita, for instance, in Israel, which is about $21,000 dollars, and compare that with the GDP per capita just across the areas managed by the Palestinian Authority, which is more like $10,000 per capita, you notice such a dramatically stark difference in economic vitality,” Romney pointed out, blithely ignoring the fact that the Palestinian economy has been hampered by restrictions over trade and movement.
Worse, Romney has spent much of his campaign espousing the need to walk noisily and carry a big stick, to misquote Roosevelt. He is in favour of projecting American military strength and expanding its armed forces, for example. At the same time, however, he has been vague about how he would deal with some of the issues that Obama has had to face. In a speech to the Virginia Military Institute in early October, the Republican contender was big on rhetoric, but short on detail.
“It is time to change course in the Middle East,” he pointed out. “That course should be organised around these bedrock principles: America must have confidence in our cause, clarity in our purpose and resolve in our might. No friend of America will question our commitment to support them… no enemy that attacks America will question our resolve to defeat them… and no one anywhere, friend or foe, will doubt America’s capability to back up our words.”
At the final presidential debate in October — which was loosely based on foreign policy — both candidates appeared to come closer together on the issue of the Middle East. Both made it clear that they were strong backers of Israel, with Obama trying desperately to court the Jewish vote, and both indicated that they were in favour of stronger sanctions against Iran, and would use military force to stop the country from securing a nuclear weapon.
Article continued on next page
All the prevaricating, posturing and flip-flops have made it hard enough for US voters, let alone the Arab world, to work out who would be the best candidate for president. One hope is that Obama’s fractious relationship with Netanyahu could result in the Democrat putting far more pressure on the Israeli prime minister in his second term than he has been able to do in his first. In any US election, no candidate can afford to alienate the prominent Jewish vote, carefully marshalled by massive political lobbying agencies such as the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC). However, in a second and final term, the argument is that Obama would feel less obligated to toe the party line and push for a real settlement — if you’ll forgive the pun — of the Palestinian question. Bill Clinton, Obama’s Democrat predecessor, trod a similar path in attempting to fashion a new deal between Ehud Barak and Yasser Arafat at Camp David in 2000.
But many are sceptical. In an interview with this magazine, earlier this year, Wadah Khanfar, the former director general of the Doha-based Al Jazeera Network, pointed out that a second term for the Democrat would simply result in Obama facing pressure from those within his own party seeking election in 2016.
“I think the American factor in the peace process should be very clear of the end target,” Khanfar said. “Because the peace process itself is just a process — there is no target for peace. I don’t think the two-state solution is convincing any more; they have reached a dead end and more rhetoric isn’t going to convince anyone.”
Muslim voters living in America still see Obama as the best option, with 68 percent of 500 registered voters polled by the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) saying that they would back the incumbent. A quarter said they were undecided while only seven percent said they would vote for Romney. The percentage of those polled who said that they felt closer to the Democratic party rose significantly from 49 percent in 2008 to 66 percent today, while the same figure for the GOP edged up from eight percent to nine percent.
For now, it seems, the best that the Middle East can hope for is probably an extended Obama presidency. But it’s more a case of the lesser of two evils, or better the devil you know, rather than any genuine hope about what the next four years may bring. The optimism that greeted the Democrat’s election four years ago has all but evaporated.
What the candidates have said
On Syria
Barack Obama: We are going to do everything we can to make sure that we are helping the opposition. But we also have to recognize that, you know, for us to get more entangled militarily in Syria is a serious step, and we have to do so making absolutely certain that we know who we are helping; that we’re not putting arms in the hands of folks who eventually could turn them against us or allies in the region.
Mitt Romney: I want to make sure they get armed, and they have the arms necessary to defend themselves, but also, to remove Assad. But I do not want to see a military involvement on the part of our troops.
On the Arab Spring
Barack Obama: One thing I think Americans should be proud of, when Tunisians began to protest, this nation — me, my administration — stood with them earlier than just about any country. In Egypt we stood on the side of democracy. In Libya we stood on the side of the people. And as a consequence, there’s no doubt that attitudes about Americans have changed. But there are always going to be elements in these countries that potentially threaten the United States. And we want to shrink those groups and those networks and we can do that.
Mitt Romney: I wish that, looking back at the beginning of the president’s term and even further back than that, that we’d have recognised that there was a growing energy and passion for freedom in that part of the world, and that we would have worked more aggressively with our friend and with other friends in the region to have them make the transition towards a more representative form of government, such that it didn’t explode in the way that it did.
On Iran
Barack Obama: The clock is ticking. We’re not going to allow Iran to perpetually engage in negotiations that lead nowhere. And I’ve been very clear to them. You know, because of the intelligence coordination that we do with a range of countries, including Israel, we have a sense of when they would get breakout capacity, which means that we would not be able to intervene in time to stop their nuclear programme.
Mitt Romney: They must not develop nuclear capability. And the way to make sure they understand that is by having, from the very beginning, the tightest sanctions possible. They need to be tightened. Our diplomatic isolation needs to be tougher. We need to indict Ahmadinejad. We need to put the pressure on them as hard as we possibly can, because if we do that, we won’t have to take the military action.
Follow us on
