Obama's Cairo Speech

It's a mistake to see President Obama's June 4 speech in Cairo merely as a repudiation of George W. Bush's wrecking-ball approach to the Middle East.
It's certainly true that during the eight years of the Bush administration, the United States lost a great deal. Bush's War on Terror, which in a moment of candor he called a Crusade, was widely viewed by Arabs, Iranians, Afghans, Pakistanis, and others as an assault on Islam itself, a conclusion that was reinforced by right-wing US Christian denunciations of Islam as a religion of violence and by neoconservative and pro-Israeli efforts to exaggerate the importance of Al Qaeda in the broader Muslim world. The Bush administration's policy of regime change -- applied in its ugliest form in Iraq -- was originally intended to include Iran, Syria, Saudi Arabia, Somalia, Yemen, Libya, and Sudan, as well, creating the image of the United States as a born-again imperial power in a region still recovering from the British, French, Italian, and other colonial powers that exited the region only recently. And Bush and Co. lumped together all of the region's anti-Western political forces, rolling Al Qaeda, the Taliban, Iran's Shiite clergy, Saddam Hussein, Hezbollah, Hamas, the Muslim Brotherhood, Saudi Arabia's Wahhabis, and the Syrian Baath party into one big "Islamofascist" ball of wax.
It is, of course, easy to find advocates for all of that, still, in the neocon-linked thinktanks and in the pages of the National Review, the Weekly Standard, the New Republic, and the Wall Street Journal editorial pages. ..more..http://www.thenation.com/blogs/dreyfuss/439868/obama_s_cairo_speech
Robert Dreyfuss
A chronicle of America's adventures in foreign policy and national security.