Losing Cairo Posted by Shadi Hamid

I've been meaning to link to my colleague Andrew Albertson's recent piece in Foreign Policy, aptly titled "Losing Cairo." Indeed, we do appear to be losing it, in more ways than one. The point that Andrew - executive director of the Project on Middle East Democracy - hammers home is that, for the first time in God knows how long, Arabs and Muslims were excited about America. I don't want to have to rehash the story of my non-English speaking Egyptian grandmother getting excited about his election and saying things like "we're praying for Obama." Indeed, people were waiting and hoping. Now, it seems they're just waiting, although for what it's not clear. Anyway, here's an excerpt from Andrew's article:

Consider the follow-up speech U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton made last month at a regional summit in Morocco. Clinton explained to her audience that though the Cairo speech was intended to launch a comprehensive new beginning between the United States and Muslim communities, the administration had decided, upon further reflection, that it would focus on only three areas of development: entrepreneurship, science and technology, and education. Democracy, religious freedom, and women's rights did not appear as part of the Cairo follow-up plans.

If one takes the charitable view, we might commend the administration for finding "shovel-ready" projects. By focusing on entrepreneurship, science, science and technology, and education, the administration found initiatives that got Arab government support. But there's a problem here that the region's young people quickly point out: The easy targets aren't necessarily the important ones. While Clinton correctly highlights jobs as a key issue in the Middle East -- particularly jobs for unemployed youth -- Washington does the region no favors by offering an entrepreneurship summit, one of its new initiatives, while avoiding the root problems hindering business such as political decay and corruption.

As they say, read the whole thing.

Comments

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Hi,
Neither Obama nor Rice came close to apologizing in their respective Cairo speeches. What they both did is to acknowledge error in U.S. policy.

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