Posted on 08/21/2009 11:12:44 AM PDT by TaraP
US President Barack Obama's Middle Eastern strategy isn't working, but his meeting with Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak on Tuesday was unlikely to help him understand why and what was needed to be done to achieve better results.
Obama and Mubarak designed the visit to demonstrate the central place Egypt currently occupies in the US's strategy. Obama delivered his address to the Muslim world in Cairo in June and has already met Mubarak three times since taking office.
Mubarak shares many of Obama's convictions and assumptions about the conditions needed to resolve the Arab-Israeli conflict.
Yet, while Obama has called upon the pro-American Arab states, including Egypt, to adopt new confidence-building measures towards Israel such as allowing Israeli airlines to fly over their territories, establishing semi-diplomatic and commercial offices and opening their borders for tourists, Mubarak said that these measure would come only after Israel signs peace agreements with all of its Arab neighbors.
IF THE Arab states don't offer any reciprocal gestures and concessions, Obama's continuing insistence on a settlement freeze will be seen as excessive, one-sided and unfounded.
Obama's Cairo speech and his obsession with the settlements issue to the point of exclusion of all other obstacles to Israeli-Palestinian conflict resolution, led the Arabs to believe that they don't have to contribute anything to the process and that the US will do all the work for them.
Israelis in turn believe that either Obama doesn't understand Middle Eastern politics or that he is seeking a highly-visible confrontation with Israel in order to improve America's image in the Muslim world.
Mubarak carefully rescheduled his visit to Washington in mid-August when Congress is in recess. He probably wanted to avoid sensitive questions about the internal conditions in Egypt, primarily the succession issue and human rights.
“Israelis in turn believe that either Obama doesn’t understand Middle Eastern politics or that he is seeking a highly-visible confrontation with Israel in order to improve America’s image in the Muslim world.”
I’ll go along with the “confrontation with Israel” theory in that last sentence.
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