When I announced two weeks ago that I would not be blogging as much thanks to my new full-time job status, little did I know just how accurate that would be. I’ve been dealing with a very important and urgent deadline, which has now passed. Now that I’ve resurfaced, I can go back to posting, albeit with greater irregularity.
As I’m sure you know, Obama is speaking at Cairo University tomorrow, fulfilling a campaign promise to give a major speech in a Muslim-majority country within his first few months of office. Washington Post:
More than any other president in a generation, Obama enjoys a reservoir of goodwill in the region. His father was Muslim. His outreach in an interview with an Arabic satellite channel, a speech to Turkey’s parliament and an address to Iranians on the Persian New Year have inclined many to listen. Just as important, he is not George W. Bush.
But Obama will still encounter a landscape in which two realities often seem to be at work, shaped by those symbols. There is America’s version of its policy toward Israel and the Palestinians, Iraq and Afghanistan, and Islamist movements such as Hamas and Hezbollah, defined in recent years by the legacy of the attacks on Sept. 11, 2001. There is another reality, from hardscrabble quarters of Beirut and Cairo to war-wrecked neighborhoods of Baghdad, where distrust of the United States runs so deep that almost anything it pronounces, however eloquent, lacks credibility, imposing a burden on Obama to deliver something far more than the unfulfilled pledges of Bush’s speeches.
Former Bush Speechwriter Michael Gerson suggests that it’s not just about Iraq and Israel:
President Obama is entering a nation and a region where [persecution by the government] is the normal price of political courage. His Cairo University speech will send a large diplomatic signal: Does Obama honor and support such courage, or de-emphasize and dismiss it in the “realist” pursuit of other ends?
One hopes that Obama and his speechwriters have consulted “The Next Founders: Voices of Democracy in the Middle East,” an important new book by Joshua Muravchik. The book profiles seven men and women — six Arab, one Iranian — taking impossible risks in the cause of human rights and self-government. They include a Saudi woman protesting the treatment of women as chattel and an Egyptian publisher trying to bring a free, responsible press to an authoritarian society. Most of these reformers have suffered imprisonment or faced threats to their lives and families.
Many of these dissidents, Muravchik told me in an interview, felt “betrayed” during the last few years of the Bush administration, when the containment of Iran and the Israeli-Palestinian peace process seemed to take precedence over democracy promotion (except in Iraq). Reformers in the region generally greeted Obama’s election with enthusiasm. But Muravchik says dissidents are becoming “disquieted about the administration’s apparent indifference to democracy and human rights abuses.”
They should be, in the Middle East and elsewhere. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has bluntly admitted that concern about Chinese human rights abuses “can’t interfere with the global economic crisis” — meaning we can’t afford to offend dictators who buy our bonds. The administration talks of reviewing sanctions on Burma’s junta. And Egypt’s ambassador to the United States enthuses that America has stopped making “human rights, democracy and religious and general freedoms” conditions for better relations.
In this environment, the message of Obama’s Cairo speech will be amplified. His Middle East advisers have probably urged him to focus (as they always do) on Israeli-Palestinian peace — the “real” concern of the region — instead of discredited democratic idealism. In fact, this sort of realism both reflects and strengthens the strategy that Middle Eastern dictators have pursued for decades — the strategy of heaping attention on Israel and the Palestinians to draw attention away from their own oppression and economic failure. There is no reason Obama cannot emphasize both a two-state solution and the need for responsible and representative states across the Middle East.
It is also likely that Obama has been counseled to avoid the “d” word — “democracy” — in his Cairo remarks. Middle East experts sometimes contend that promoting “justice” and “good governance” is more culturally sensitive than employing such Westernized concepts as “democracy” and “freedom.” The argument is common — and uninformed. “Justice,” in this context, implies human rights as the gift of a wise emir or enlightened dictator. But, as Nour and others have discovered, such gifts can be withdrawn on a whim. The next founders in the Middle East are not merely begging for more rights from autocrats; they are seeking freedom from autocracy. They want more than for tyrants to open the door of reform a crack; they want to open the door themselves.
Any presidential speech abroad has multiple audiences. One of them, in this case, is the Egyptian government, whose cooperation is needed on issues that range from proliferation to peace. But another audience will be dissidents and reformers in Egypt and beyond. And a president who does not speak boldly for their political rights — their democratic rights — has little useful to say to them.
I don’t often agree with Gerson, or with prominent neoconservative and Iraq war defender Joshua Muravchik (though I am interested in reading the latter’s new book), but I think they get it about right here.
The sad reality is that, as both Gerson and Muravchik acknowledge, the Bush Administration failed to live up to its promises on democracy and human rights, particularly in Egypt. What they fail to acknowledge is that the war in Iraq was a major factor not only in weaking Bush’s commitment to promoting democracy elsewhere, but also in discrediting broader U.S. efforts to promote democratic governance and human rights.
That said, we are more than four months into an Obama Administration, and as of today, not one of the key democracy and human rights positions is occupied by someone the President appointed. It’s not entirely the Administration’s fault: Samantha Power is at the NSC, but she’s currently on maternity leave, and troglo-conservatives in the Senate are holding up Harold Koh’s nomination to be legal advisor. But other key posts — most notably the position of Assistant Secretary for Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor — remain vacant. The reality is that neither Obama or Hillary currently have anyone who can argue that human rights and democracy should be given prominent attention in Obama’s speech.
I continue to believe, perhaps naively, that statements by Hillary about human rights not playing as central a role in U.S. foreign policy as in past Administrations reflects not her opinion as much as a tilt in favor of those in the Department of State who do not like to talk about democracy and human rights (which, for those unfamiliar with the Department, means those line officers whose main responsibility is maintaining good relations with the country in question). And I will reserve final judgment about the Administration’s human rights policies until Power, Koh, and others are in a position to balance those who suggest that promoting human rights and democracy is neither convenient nor realistic.
It’s also worth noting that, according to rumors I’ve heard, the U.S. Embassy in Cairo has pushed State and USAID to cut back their funding of democracy- and human rights-oriented projects, particularly those that have earned the disfavor of the Mubarak regime.
About a year ago, I was asked by Freedom House to go to Cairo to give a speech to a group of younger democracy activists, including some of those who had used Facebook to organize a general strike against the Mubarak regime. Most were determined to continue their work to open up Egyptian civil society and promote democratic reform, but some were discouraged by constant government harassment. In fact, when the government found out about the meeting at which I was scheduled to speak, they prevented it from happening. So I spent most of the next few days talking to the activists, going to their offices, and learning more about their work.
It was, needless to say, inspiring. I hope that the President meets with these folks, and that he acknowledges their courageous work. Somehow, however — particularly given the fact that one of the programs to be cut is Freedom House’s efforts to help these young activists — I doubt that he will.
Here’s hoping I’m wrong.
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