Obama’s Response

President Obama promised change, a promise he made again in his Cairo speech. He verbally embraced the Muslim world, but the world’s most powerful man has to follow his words up with deeds. That will be an exhausting process.

The applause Obama got from the hand-picked audience at Cairo University for his well-publicized address to the Muslim world was assured from the beginning, as was his rejection of hard-line extremism. But he was also able to inspire many of the skeptics who probably make up a majority in the Arab world.

He approached the Arabs in the way many expected and as some conservatives in Washington and Tel Aviv had feared. He not only repeated the assurance that Washington wasn’t at war with Islam, he also reiterated his opposition to the building of Israeli settlements in the West Bank and his support for the establishment of a Palestinian state. Obama compared the Palestinians’ situation to that of blacks in the United States during slavery and further said that the Iraq war represented a failure of American foreign policy.

With this, Obama touched on those things that are of most importance to Palestinians. But a speech, alone, cannot change America’s image. Obama also said that the basis of U.S. Near East policy would continue to be the “unbreakable partnership” between the U.S. and Israel. Although the change in image cultivation with the Islamic world may be radical, the change in actual policies can be only gradual.

If the U.S. is serious about publicly treating its Arab partners with greater respect, it will have a positive effect on America’s image in the region. But that will be a long-term process that just began with his Cairo speech and will not end for a long time to come. More important than any good-will gestures by the president will be policy changes that stop the flood of horrifying pictures from Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib, and the destruction of human rights America has wrought in the name of freedom.