Obama’s address to Muslims: a new showcase for old goods

MOSCOW. (RIA Novosti commentator Dmitry Babich) – On Thursday, US President Barack Obama addressed an appreciative crowd at Cairo University, pledging “to seek a new beginning between the United States and Muslims.”

Obama spoke after meeting with Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak on the second stop of his four-nation trip to the Middle East and Europe.

In fact, his long speech did not deviate much from the guidelines of the U.S. policy in the Middle East and Afghanistan, but he proved that he was indeed a very talented salesman of unsalable stock.

He chided Israel for continuing to build settlements in the West Bank. “Many wait in refugee camps in the West Bank, Gaza, and neighboring lands for a life of peace and security that they have never been able to lead,” he said, actually repeating the stand of the previous U.S. administrations since Bill Clinton.

He also promised “to remove combat troops from Iraqi cities by July, and to remove all our troops from Iraq by 2012.” But then, the Bush administration never said it planned to turn Iraq into a colony; it only refused to name the deadline for withdrawing troops from it.

Obama said: “I have made it clear to the Iraqi people that we pursue no bases, and no claim on their territory or resources. Iraq's sovereignty is its own.” But does anyone in Iraq or other Muslim countries believe him?

The United States has military bases in Kosovo, Saudi Arabia, Afghanistan and the former Soviet republics of Central Asia, which is proof of the old principle, “There is nothing more permanent than a temporary U.S. base.”

And yet, people want to believe Obama. The streets of Cairo, a huge city with a population of 20 million people, were deserted during his speech. The people were both skeptical and interested. Are they satisfied with what he has said?

Obama spoke on the Palestinian issue in his traditional manner. He made an emotional plea for the right of Palestinians to live in dignity in an independent state of their own, and even used the term “Palestine,” unlike his predecessors who preferred to speak about the Palestinian Autonomy or a future Palestinian state.

However, power in Gaza belongs to Hamas, a radical Islamic movement, with the Israeli authorities using blockade and bombings to make Palestinians regret the “democratic choice” they made in 2007, when Hamas received a majority vote.

Obama criticized radicals in both Israel and Palestine and called on Hamas to “put an end to violence, recognize past agreements, and recognize Israel's right to exist.” He said, “America will align our policies with those who pursue peace.”

But Hamas was created to fight Israel, which it refuses to recognize, and to bury the peace accords reached in Oslo in 1993. It is unlikely to abandon these goals, just as Bolsheviks could not abandon the idea of communism in the 1920s.

Obama also needs to keep the American public’s sympathies, which he has so far been doing quite well largely because the Americans could no longer stand the Bush administration, which had launched the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

However, more and more people in the U.S. are dissatisfied with Obama. Some pro-Israeli Christian fundamentalists and Jewish conservatives have accused him of weakness and said Israel’s borders without the settlements in the Palestinian territory could be compared to the “Auschwitz borders.”

To silence these voices, Obama badly needs positive results, be it a minor improvement in Iraq or Afghanistan, or progress in the issue of Iran’s nuclear programs.

One of the keys to solving these problems lies in Russia, which has a wealth of experience in dealing with the three difficult Islamic states. This makes one expect that Obama will mention Russia in his next address to the Muslim world.

The opinions expressed in this article are the author’s and do not necessarily represent those of RIA Novosti.