WASHINGTON: President Barack Obama will address US policy toward the Middle East in a speech that could be delivered as early as next week.
Aides said Obama’s emphasis would be regional and political, highlighting the democratic values that have linked the popular uprisings that started in Tunisia and Egypt and quickly spread throughout the region. Obama was not expected to focus on religion, as he did in his address to Muslims during a 2009 trip to Cairo, Egypt.
A US official said Obama had originally planned to deliver the speech during the first week in May, but it was pushed back because of the raid in Pakistan that led to the death of Al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden. A new date has not been set, but the White House said Obama could speak before he leaves for a nearly weeklong trip to Europe next weekend, which includes the G8 summit in France.
Bin Laden’s death has given the US administration an opportunity to cast Al-Qaeda as a movement past its prime, as young people throughout the Middle East and North Africa use political protest to vent their grievances.
Yet the US has struggled to find a consistent approach to the political uprisings that have swept through the region. While Obama publicly called for longtime Egyptian leader Hosni Mubarak to step down from power, he has not challenged the legitimacy of Syrian President Bashar Assad, whose forces are leading a bloody crackdown against political protesters.
The White House says there are no plans for military action to stop that crackdown, despite the US, along with European and Arab allies, using military power to try to stop government-backed forces from attacking civilians in Moammar Qaddafi’s Libya.
The White House has said that each country is unique, and therefore the US response must be as well. But Obama aides, and the State Department in particular, have grown eager for the president to outline his thoughts and policies publicly on the Arab awakening in a comprehensive way.
Though details of the speech are still being decided, the president is expected to highlight the underlying values that have united political movements throughout the region, including the yearning for more freedom and better standards of living.
Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton also has hinted at some of the themes Obama would touch on during the speech, noting that the US is focused on partnerships not just with governments in the Middle East and North Africa, but also the peoples of the region.
"We start from the understanding that America’s core interests and values have not changed, including our commitment to promote human rights, resolve long-standing conflicts, counter Iran’s threats, and defeat Al-Qaeda and its extremist allies," she said during a speech in Washington last month.
Obama’s agenda next week already was to have been heavily focused on the Middle East, with Jordan’s King Abdullah II and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu making separate visits to the White House.
Obama is not expected to detail a fresh path for peace between Israel and the Palestinians in his speech, although he is likely to discuss the conflict in the context of the wider region and note that the ongoing changes elsewhere in the Middle East could actually help the peace process.
White House spokesman Jay Carney said, "I think it’s a speech to a broader audience than just the Arab world."
Privately, officials and experts cautioned against reports that Obama was ready to unveil a new approach or policy towards the Middle East — especially on the peace talks stalemate between Israel and the Palestinians.
The president is believed likely to make the case that uprisings by the people of Middle Eastern nations against long-ruling autocrats reveal the ideology of bin Laden’s Al-Qaeda movement to be redundant.
"It’s an interesting coincidence of timing — that he is killed at the same time that you have a model emerging in the region of change that is completely the opposite of bin Laden’s model," Ben Rhodes, a top Obama foreign policy advisor, told the Journal.
Bin Laden perished in a US special forces raid at a compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan early on May 2, ending a 10-year manhunt for the mastermind of the Sept. 11 attacks in 2001 and other strikes against the United States. –Additional reporting by AP’s Matthew Lee and AFP.
