Barack Obama Predicted Egypt Will Have a Secular Future

The U.S. president explained why he likes Hosni Mubarak and his very own presidential post.

U.S. President Barack Obama is confident that radical Islamic organizations will not take over the power in Egypt. In his interview with Fox News, he said that the opposition group known as the Muslim Brotherhood does not have major support and after the outbreak of demonstrations the country will have “a free and fair election.” According to the words of the head of the White House, the U.S. will not insist on the immediate resignation of President Mubarak, thus giving the Egyptians the right to make their own choice. In his interview, he also touched key issues of U.S. internal politics and has shown himself in a new light as a moderate politician that, of course, should secure his re-election in 2012.

The day before the meeting at the White House ,a television host for Fox News, Bill O’Reilly, proudly noted that his interview with the U.S. president would gather a larger audience than “any other program did during the whole history of humanity.” He had all the reasons to believe that. Fox News used to belong to media magnate Rupert Murdoch; the channel has ultra-conservative views and has been topping the charts of American channels for the last two years. Furthermore, the interview with the U.S. president by Fox News was broadcast the day before a major sports event in America — the National Football League championship game, known as the Super Bowl. The final game was expected to be watched by 106 million people this year.

Fox News journalists have been accused by the White House of being a mouthpiece for the Republican Party and ungrounded criticism of the president. These facts have heated up the interest in the interview. During the presidential pool in 2009, White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs even threatened to take Fox’s accreditation away, when one of the TV hosts said that “Obama hates the culture and values of white people.”

The key subjects of the interview were the events occurring in Egypt. In reply to the question about President Mubarak’s future, President Obama said that the U.S. was not going to insist on Hosni Mubarak’s immediate resignation. “We can say that, ‘The time is now for you to start making a change in that country,’” he said. “Mubarak has already decided he’s not running for re-election again.” The president thinks that “Egypt is not going to go back to where it was” and a government has to be formed in the country that represents interests of people of all social classes.

The U.S. president is confident that radical Islamic organizations will not get hold of power. Of the Muslim Brotherhood, he said that “they are well-organized and there are strains of their ideology that are anti-U.S. There’s no doubt about it. But here’s the thing that we have to understand, there are a whole bunch of secular folks in Egypt, there are a whole bunch of educators and civil society in Egypt that wants to come to the fore as well.”

The U.S. president parried a question about whether Hosni Mubarak, after stepping down, would make public details of secret deals between the Egyptian and American governments. The secret deals include an agreement to release people suspected of terrorist activity and American intelligence-oriented operations in the territory of Egypt.

“He’s been a good partner when it comes to the peace with Israel. There have been counterterrorism efforts that he’s been very supported of. But we’ve also said consistently said to him both publicly and privately is that trying to suppress your own people is something that is not sustainable,” Obama specified.

The talk about Egypt on Fox News had a special meaning for President Obama. Remember that, after long considerations in the summer of 2009, he had chosen this very country to address the Muslim world. Therefore, it was important for Mr. Obama, who has a battle for the second presidential term to win in 2012, to show Egypt and the Muslim world that they are not lost for the United States.

From the Egypt issues to the American ones, Barack Obama continued standing up for the key goals of his presidency. At times it was not an easy thing to do. O’Reilly did not miss a chance to remind the president that the health care reform still had no major support and the Wall Street Journal called Barack Obama “a determined man of the left whose goal is to redistribute much larger levels of income across society.” The Fox News journalist said that the U.S. president has been trying to change his image recently in order to appear before the voters as a moderate centrist.

Barack Obama retorted that only O’Reilly’s audience thought of him as “a left liberal and socialist.” He pointed out that he never changed his beliefs and the interference of the state with the economy during the last two years was solely caused by the necessity to cope with the consequences of the economic crisis.

Barack Obama was much more eager to answer the questions concerning what he dislikes in his job. “The biggest problem for me is being in the bubble. It’s very hard to escape,” confessed the U.S. president.

Another problem, Barack Obama said, is that a president has to deal with issues “nobody else has been able to solve.” “The easy stuff gets solved by somebody else,” he specified. “By the time it gets to me, you don’t have easy answers. You know that you don’t have perfect information, and you know that you’re not going to have a perfect solution.”

The U.S. president admitted that the he has become a more “guarded” person for the last two years, but he just smiled in reply to the question of whether he is concerned about many Americans hating him. “The people who dislike you don’t know you,” said Obama. “What they hate is whatever funhouse mirror image of you that’s out there.”

The interview lasted just 15 minutes and, to the audience’s surprise, went on quite peacefully. Observers say the meeting was beneficial for both sides: Fox News topped the charts and Barack Obama had addressed the audience, almost one third of the U.S. population, and “had also tried on a new image of a moderate politician.”