Cairo

I hope President Obama's overtures lead to greater peace and stability. Because if they don't, he is laying out a basis for considerable future trouble. For a guy who talks so much about listening and dialogue, he seems to overlook a great deal of the nuance and complexity of his predecessor's policy -- and that neglect founds most of his unusually strong critique of that policy. Obama positions his policy as a dramatic break from Bush, but there really isn't much that is new, and much of the "innovation" are things Bush was doing that Obama won't acknowledge. Bush was differentiating Islam from terrorism three days after the World Trade Center was bombed. If Obama ever does anything controversial, he may want a better hearing for the complexities of his policies than he has afforded Bush.

I don't see how it is helpful to frame the Iranian nuclear problem as simply a formal deviation from treaty commitments; these wouldn't matter so much if Iran weren't a terror sponsor with a sizeable faction founded on the destruction of Israel. Is it really good idea to focus our complaint on Iranian compliance with a treaty that Israel hasn't signed? Doesn't that lead to an equivalence between Iranian nukes and Israeli, especially when the President is setting out the reduction of all nukes as a policy goal?

Nor do I understand how it helps to tacitly accept the criticisms of American policy. The CIA intervened in Iran fifty years ago; maybe it wasn't the right thing to do, maybe we needed to do it, but it was a long time ago.

I don't like the President very much. I think he vastly overestimates his own understanding, and attributes the apparent contradictions of others to their errors rather than his own incomplete knowledge of their views or the problem. He is far too quick to make declarative statements with little basis, and this leads him to some very questionable rhetoric. Barack Obama has very little basis to tell Muslims what their own faith commands of them. And while he might speak more with more authority on Christian values, he softens their clear statements with universal implications to uncontroversial and meaningless formulations like "progress". Obama is constantly telling people universal truths that are obvious to anyone who will drop their ill-conceived ideas in disagreement with him, but offers surprisingly thin arguments for those truths.

So perhaps I look too hard for the negatives and weaknesses in his rhetoric and policy. Perhaps he will convince our opponents that we are genuinely not in opposition to them, and sway the larger mass of Muslims to greater sympathy and cooperation with us. Perhaps these gestures of trust and openness will inspire reciprocal movement. I would happily rethink the lessons I've drawn from history to understand how we've arrived at a new vision of peace and harmony. I'm already obscure, I have no reputation to lose, and in any should rather lose a reputation to error than live in a world of warfare because I was right.

But if this outreach falls short, I'm afraid we may find that the President has strengthened the rhetoric of our enemies, confused our ability to argue against them, and undermined our credibility.