標題:The politics of self-abasement
By Christopher Caldwell
Published: June 5 2009 20:57 | Last updated: June 5 2009 20:57
With his speech to the Muslim world at Cairo University on Thursday, Barack
Obama put a new face on American foreign policy, or at least a face that the
world has not seen since the 1970s. This is America’s penitent, humbled and
even sycophantic face.
President Obama seeks a “new beginning” to US-Muslim relations through
frank self-examination and mutual respect. The US is locked in a battle for
the hearts and minds of Muslims, whether it likes it or not. Self-examination
can be a sign of strength. But we should not delude ourselves that the Muslim
world sees it as such. The Iranian Ayatollah Ali Khamenei speaks for many
when he says that it is “the power of Muslims which [has] made the new US
administration try to portray a new image”. And there is another problem:
the politics of national self-abasement, from Jimmy Carter to Mikhail
Gorbachev, is not popular with voters. It cannot be practised for long
because it entails a huge – usually fatal – drawing down of political
capital.
The US is still, paradoxically, the country that has felt the lash of
globalisation least. The president’s trip to the Middle East gave an
inkling of what diplomacy is like when someone else has the upper hand.
In part it was the atmospherics: the state department memo
warning journalists accompanying Mr Obama to Saudi Arabia that they were “
expressly prohibited from leaving the hotel or engaging in any journalistic
activities outside of coverage of the Potus visit”; the photos of Hillary
Clinton, the secretary of state, in a headscarf; the invitations extended to
members of the Muslim Brotherhood in Cairo.
In part it was the president’s oratorical tics: the greeting of assalum
alaykum; describing the Middle East as the region in which Islam was first “
revealed” (a formulation usually used by believers, not outsiders); or “
peace be upon them” (a phrase many Americans know only from Osama bin Laden’
s internet videos). What looks polite to most of the world looks obsequious
to American voters. The carefully vetted Cairo audience clapped primarily for
Koranic citations or concrete concessions (“I have ordered the prison at
Guantánamo Bay closed”), and rarely for the soaring sentiments of which a
US listener would be proudest.
“Turning the page on the Bush era” means partly a change in tone. Mr Obama
distinguishes the Iraq war (which he opposed) from the Afghan one (of which
he plans a major escalation this summer) by calling Iraq a “war of choice”.
That is an artificial distinction. The US had other choices at its disposal
after 9/11 besides invading Afghanistan. They may have been foolish or
ineffective or cowardly, but they were choices. Choosing to invade, even
after 9/11, provoked fury in the Muslim world. On Thursday, Mr Obama made
important concessions to this fury. The US, he said, would seek no permanent
bases in either Iraq or Afghanistan.
But the key point of the speech was to downgrade the US alliance with Israel,
to shift US support from the Israeli position to the Muslim one. “The United
States does not accept the legitimacy of continued Israeli settlements [in
the West Bank],” Mr Obama said. The US suddenly finds itself with roughly
the same Middle East policy as the European Union. Israelis will not find the
blow much softened by a few tough remarks about Holocaust denial and some
warnings to Palestinians against terrorism – a word Mr Obama did not use.
Mr Obama’s criticism of terrorism is two-pronged. On the one hand he sees
terrorism as morally wrong, and here he was most eloquent: “It is a sign
neither of courage nor power to shoot rockets at sleeping children, or to
blow up old women on a bus,” he said. On the other hand, he sees terrorism
as ineffective, and here he is far less persuasive. “For centuries, black
people in America suffered the lash of the whip as slaves and the humiliation
of segregation,” Mr Obama said. “But it was not violence that won full and
equal rights.”
You can say it was not violence alone that won black people their rights. But
an American should not need reminding that the US civil war – fought over
nothing but slavery and its constitutional implications – was spectacularly
bloody, complete with starvation camps, torched cities and actual terrorism,
too. Even the last century’s civil rights movement required not just the
marches of Martin Luther King, but federal troops.
What is most inspiring about Mr Obama’s oratory is also what is most
disturbing about it. In his oratorical universe, the right thing and the
effective thing tend to coincide. In his discussion of the Muslim headscarf
he displayed the same highly appealing libertarian conservatism that won him
many votes in the centre of the American electorate last fall. “I reject the
view of some in the west that a woman who chooses to cover her hair is
somehow less equal,” he said. “I respect those women who choose to live
their lives in traditional roles. But it should be their choice.”
If “choice” is the way forward, then Mr Obama is addressing his audience
not as Muslims but as citizens. Politics is about choice. Religion is not –
it is about truth. As soon as there are meaningful free choices about
whether to be liberated or traditional, the problem defines itself away. The
point of the Cairo speech was to break faith with Israel on peace
negotiations, in hope that the move will provoke concessions from Muslims.
Wrapped around that realpolitik was an oration which was heartfelt and subtle
– but which neither made the US stronger than before, nor made the world
safer.
The writer is a senior editor at The Weekly Standard. His book, Reflections
on the Revolution in Europe: Immigration, Islam and the West, was published
in May
More columns at www.ft.com/caldwell
Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2009
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