[Marxism] Achcar on Obama's Cairo speech

[Louis Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxx>]

http://www.zcommunications.org/znet/viewArticle/21635
Obama's Cairo Speech
June 06, 2009 By Gilbert Achcar

Barack Obama's speech in Cairo on the 4th of June 2009 definitely lived 
up to expectations -- provided we agree on what could have been 
expected. With regard to the form, Obama fully lived up to his role as 
the new black and human face of America in its relation with the rest of 
the world in general, and with the Muslim world in particular. He 
respected the specifications of his mission, seeking to repair the huge 
damage caused to America's image and "soft power" by the previous 
administration of George W. Bush. The world witnessed a spectacular 
attempt at seducing the Muslim world -- its youth in particular.

The president's assets were intensively used: the colour of his skin, 
his Muslim paternal background, his early opposition to the invasion of 
Iraq and, last but not least, his Rooseveltian posture suited to our 
times of global economic crisis. The speech was very obviously inspired 
from FDR's famous "Four Freedoms" speech of the 6th of June 1941: the 
language of peace and disarmament, i.e. freedom from fear; freedom of 
thought; and religious freedom. Only Roosevelt's "freedom from want" was 
missing, a testimony to the extent to which this concept is embarrassing 
for governments that are temporarily resorting to "Keynesian" tools only 
in order to rescue the neoliberal economic system.

This being said, the difference with the Bush-Cheney administration was 
not only one of style and tone. The difference in substance too was 
blatant, despite preconceived hostile assertions that it was pretty much 
the same discourse and that, although the new president is black, the 
White House is still... white. The key substantive differences could be 
summarized as follows: a criticism of the U.S. invasion of Iraq; a 
commitment to withdraw all troops from that country; an acknowledgement 
of the Palestinian people's more than sixty-year old tragedy (implicitly 
recognizing the Nakba); a clear and firm rejection of Israel's expansion 
of its settlements in the occupied West Bank; a relatively open attitude 
toward Hamas; an acknowledgment of Iran's right to develop nuclear 
energy within the boundaries of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty; 
and a willingness to talk to the Iranian government, without preconditions.

These are important substantive differences, although they represent no 
dramatic break with the longer perspective of U.S. foreign policy. The 
truth is that it is the Bush-Cheney administration that represented a 
discontinuity with the long tradition: Obama's attitude is actually much 
closer to that of Bush senior than was that of the latter's own son. The 
commitment to settle the Israeli-Arab conflict, as a major source of 
harm to U.S. strategic interests, and the willingness to exert pressure 
on Israel to that end, were already displayed by the Bush senior 
administration. And the openness to Tehran (and Damascus) was clearly 
advocated by the bipartisan Baker-Hamilton Iraq Study Group in 2006, 
although the Bush administration refused to follow this part of its 
recommendations.

The rest is hardly new, even when compared to the record of the previous 
president: the advocacy of a "two-state solution" for the 
Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and -- despite all false impressions -- 
the discourse about Islam, democracy, etc. People tend to confuse the 
neoconservative discourse with that of the Bush-Cheney, and for that 
matter Rice, administration: they were different. George W. Bush could 
outbid anybody in his "respect" for Islam -- and, to be sure, in his 
close friendship with the Saudi dynasty! And, needless to say, Barack 
Obama will ultimately be judged for his deeds and not, or not only, for 
his words.

Beyond these differences and convergences, nothing else could be 
expected from Obama's speech, if one adhered to a sober assessment of 
what he and his administration represent. Not the leftward shift in 
domestic and foreign policies brought with the election of FD Roosevelt 
in 1932 on the crest of a wave of social radicalization, but a return to 
the centre after eight years of dramatic shift of the White House to the 
far right of the mainstream political spectrum, and a return to the 
fundamentals of bipartisan consensus in U.S. foreign policy.

On one point however, one could have expected better from Barack Obama 
than what he delivered: His speech was lamentably constrained within the 
parameters of the "clash of civilizations" paradigm -- whose main 
theoretician, the late Samuel Huntington, did not advocate the clash, as 
his non-readers believe, but warned of it. The paradigm was one of a 
world divided into blocs, the majority of which are constituted around a 
single religious criterion. Thus, Obama in Cairo exclusively addressed 
the "Muslims," scattering his speech with quotes from the Koran, 
expressing a view of the world dominated by religion -- and only 
Abrahamic religions at that, forgetting that in his own country there 
are millions who do not belong to any of Christianity, Judaism or Islam, 
not to mention those who refuse to belong to any religion at all. In 
doing so, he paid an unintended tribute to the man whom he mentioned at 
the beginning of his speech and built up as its main target: Osama bin 
Laden.


Gilbert Achcar is Professor at the School of Oriental and African 
Studies (SOAS) of the University of London. A translation of this 
article is published in the June 5, 2009 edition of the Italian daily Il 
Manifesto.

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