Obama is trying to mimic G W Bush in that he supports Islam, but not radical Islam... but the real radical departure was that he no longer shows any loyalty to Islamic allies who have no Democracy. The moral statement rings hollow, but it is going to scare the hell out of the Saudis... who Obama is trying to play nice with. This shows how incompetent Obama really is. He can't even help the so called "Moderates" he believes exist.
...this was not a speech about Israeli-Palestinian issues. On the contrary, he was trying to find a framework for pushing that question onto a backburner. Here he failed completely...
President Barack Obama’s big Middle East speech is extraordinarily important. I think that it has been largely misinterpreted and deserves a very detailed examination. Forgive me then for analyzing it at length but that’s necessary to understand both Obama’s thinking and policy.
First and foremost, this could be called Obama’s George Bush speech.
The intention was to find some way to make the main priority of U.S. policy the support of democracy in the Arab world. This is precisely the theme that Obama’s supporters ridiculed when Bush did it. So Obama had to find some way to approach the issue without anyone realizing he had copied Bush. He succeeded! No one seems to have caught on yet.Continue reading: Obama's Middle East Speech: The Opposite of Strategy Is CatastropheBarry Rubin is director of the Global Research in International Affairs (GLORIA) Center and editor of the Middle East Review of International Affairs (MERIA) Journal. His latest books are The Israel-Arab Reader(seventh edition), The Long War for Freedom: The Arab Struggle for Democracy in the Middle East
(Wiley), and The Truth About Syria
(Palgrave-Macmillan). His latest book is Israel: An Introduction, to be published by Yale University Press later this year. You can read more of Barry Rubin's posts at Rubin Reports, and now on his new blog, Rubin Reports, on Pajamas Media
