I first saw President Obama's interview with al-Arabiya last night on CNN's Anderson 360, which had on a Middle Eastern analyst who described himself as giddy after having watched it. I felt the exact same way. President Obama's measured tone, his repeated expressions of respect for Muslims, his concern for the future of children in Gaza and Israel, his mentioning his own Muslim family members, and the fact that his first formal interview of his Presidency was to an Arab language channel all combined with his choice of George Mitchell as P/I envoy and his immediate departure to the region illustrated a clear departure from the Bush years.
I TiVOed this morning's Morning Joe, expecting this interview to dominate today's political chatter. Sadly, the political world was still mainly focused on the Blago circus. However, I found a great deal of very positive reaction (and some expected kneejerk Wingnut criticism).
Marc Lynch at Foreign Policy was pretty ecstatic:
His remarks hit the sweet spot again and again. He repeatedly emphasized his intention of moving past the iron walls of the 'war on terror' and 'clash of civilizations' which so dominated the Bush era. "My job is to communicate to the Muslim world that the United States is not your enemy," Obama said, emphasizing as in his inaugural address that he is "ready to initiate a new partnership [with the Muslim world] based on mutual respect and mutual interest." And where so much of the Bush administration's 'public diplomacy' was about manipulating and lecturing, Obama begins -- as he should -- with listening: "what I told [Mitchell] is start by listening, because all too often the United States starts by dictating..so let's listen."
Lynch also links toa Jordanian blogger who is encouraged, but wary:
I agree that, generally, Americans are not the enemy of the Muslim world. However, I’m just not sure how to classify those Americans who have big guns, big tanks and big jets that occupy a neighboring country and have a habit of killing a lot of its people. Or, at least, the Americans who sell those big guns, big tanks and big jets to other people that occupy another neighboring country and have a habit of killing a lot of its people.
Diplomacy is oh so confusing.
Andrew Sullivan also seems to have felt something resembling giddiness:
It popped up on television last night and I had two reactions. The first was a sense of met expectation. Part of the rationale for Obama's presidency from a foreign policy perspective was always his unique capacity to rebrand America in the eyes of the Muslim world. Since even the hardest core neocons agree that wooing the Muslim center is critical to winning the long war against Jihadism, Obama's outreach is unremarkable and should be utterly uncontroversial. Bush tried for a while to do the same. But Karen Hughes is not exactly Barack Obama. And the simple gesture of choosing an Arab media outlet for his first televised interview as president is extremely powerful. It has the elegance of a minimalist move with maximalist aims. It is about the same thing as inviting Rick Warren or supping with George Will: it's about R-E-S-P-E-C-T...
What Obama is doing is appealing over the heads of Muslim leaders directly to Muslim populations. I cannot think of any other president with the same kind of personal credibility in such a critical time.
Sullivan also posted a comment he got from a reader that showed just how effective Obama's interview is in some corners:
I am Muslim (a convert) and have been on board with Obama since Iowa. My husband's family (Lebanese Sunni) have always been skeptical about Obama, his motives and his intentions throughout the campaign. I always forwarded them information during the campaign about Obama's positions on the Middle East, the I/P situation, etc. telling them "This guy is different". Their response has been "Just because his middle name is Hussein doesn't mean he will be a friend to the Muslim world", preferring to wait it out and see his actions.
Well, this interview changed a lot of their minds! The most skeptical, my brother in law, who is from Syria, was shocked that he mentioned his Muslim family, knowing that during the campaign he tried to downplay this information. He was also surprised (and elated) when Obama said "[The U.S] needs to start by listening...typically in the past we have started by dictating". The rest of my family was pleasantly surprised, and very happy when he said (paraphrase) "But these are just words, and what we need now are actions." This impressed them greatly. The most striking aspect they liked was his empathy for Muslim children and their lives. This really resonated for them.
I was pleased to see that the very same things that impressed me about the interview also impressed these Muslims.
At Time's Middle East blog, Scott MacLeod breaks down what the President intended to communicate and what he achieved with this interview:
Obama is critical of past U.S. Middle East policy, including insensitivity to the perspectives of the people in the region...
Obama seems to see the need to address the legitimate interests of Arabs in the Middle East conflict, but he's going to judge their position based on their actions and not merely their words...
Obama seems intent on winning over the Arab world, to bolster U.S. credibility in pushing his Middle East policy, by leveraging his personal popularity on the Muslim street based largely on his Muslim roots and underdog image and by effectively campaigning for support among Muslims as he did for American voters. This could have a significant impact on his ability to win backing for compromises from the Arab world needed to achieve peace. The Arab street as well as Arab governments were skeptical even of Bush's better Middle East initiatives simply because they didn't trust him...
As part of his endeavor to show respect, Obama seeks to assure Muslims and educate Americans about the distinction between Muslim extremists and Muslims who disagree with American policy. He's saying that the war on terrorism is not a war on Islam, that not all Muslims are terrorists and not all terrorists are Muslims.
Joe Klein was also impressed but he tried to see the interview through what he calls the Israel First crowd:
My first thought was: I bet the Israel First lobby is going to find some way to be displeased about this thoughtful, if lapidary, interview. And, sure enough, first gripe goes to Eric Trager at the Commentary blog for this deeply superficial and silly analysis of the interview. And also inaccurate: Trager says that Mitchell will only have authority if he is perceived as speaking for the President, which is true enough--and also exactly what Obama said earlier, during the photo-op when he announced the Mitchell trip to the middle east earlier in the day. Mitchell will speak for the President...
The most important thing about the interview, in my opinion, obviously was the sequencing of it--putting Al Arabiya first is a sign of respect toward the Muslim world of the sort that was sorely lacking during Bush's Administration. But I'm worried: the Mitchell effort is sure to include a less tolerant attitude toward Israeli encroachments on Palestinian lands and, quite possibly, efforts to engage Hamas over the longer term (along with an insistence on peaceful behavior by Hamas).
The Israel First crowd won't like that and they may well be bolstered by a Likud victory in the Israeli elections on February 11. They are just itching to go after Obama, to fire a broadside as soon as he strays from the Bush policy.
The Eric Trager Commentary piece to which Klein references is indeed typically childish and kneejerk in its criticism:
Barack Obama ran for U.S. President as the anti-Bush - the candidate who wasn’t going to fight wars for idealistic purposes, such as spreading democracy. Well, Obama might abhor "stupid wars," but that hardly makes him a realist: true to his community-organizing roots, he apparently sees impoverished foreigners as one of the many constituencies he represents - right up there with the Americans.
The take-away from this miserable performance is rather straightforward: Obama’s personal charisma cannot mask his utter lack of substance on the Middle East. Here’s to hoping that Obama can fix this shortcoming before people start listening to what he’s actually saying.
The Right Wing cocoon must be a truly suffocating place.
Someone in the comments bemoaned the fact that I didn't include more Middle Eastern reaction. Therefore, I want to quote from this UK Telegraph article "Muslim leaders praise Barack Obama's break with Bush but criticise him over Israel", from which I culled these reactions:
Omar Abdullah, the chief minister of Jammu and Kashmir, said Mr Obama's comments to Dubai-based Al Arabiya represented a "significant" break with Mr Bush.
"The Muslim world as a whole feels the United States is more supportive of Israel's actions than it should be, and that Israel would not take the liberties that they do without the unflinching support of the US. Suggesting that they sit down together might be just the push they need.
"It's significant that he's saying these things at the beginning of his term – usually American presidents do this towards the end of their terms. It's the tone [of his speech] and the timing. The fact that he has offered to reach out [to Iran] is significant," he said.
In Afghanistan, Haji Din Mohammed, governor of Kabul and head of one of the country's most influential families, welcomed Mr Obama's comments and said he hoped they would herald a new approach on the ground in Afghanistan, where he said the US under George W. Bush behaved as a dictator instead of consulting Afghans as partners.
In Pakistan, Khalid Khawaja, a former senior officer in Pakistan's ISI intelligence service and a personal friend and supporter of Osama bin Laden, said Mr Obama would be judged not on the "nice words" in his speech, but by his actions. So far, these heralded only a continuation of the previous administration's "war on terror" he said.
"Actions speak louder than words. Whatever Obama says, there were drone attacks on Pakistan. He is comparatively less arrogant but ultimately he's taking the same kind of action. He says America is ready to lead the world but they're the worse leaders we've ever had. Sixty-six Pakistanis were released from Guantanamo and now they're half mad, on morphine and under psychiatric treatment. We ask for an apology, for compensation for these people," he said.
Update [2009-1-27 15:48:49 by John Campanelli]: Daniel Larison, a conservative, has this interesting, skeptical take on the interview:
Quin Hillyer complains about Obama’s first television interview, which Jake Tapper reports will be with Al-Arabiya. This is different, but it doesn’t mean very much one way or the other. At most it means that President Obama was serious when he made irenic remarks in his Inaugural directed to Muslims, but I suspect this has zero significance when it comes to policy....
This Al-Arabiya interview is most likely a case of attempting to "re-package" or "re-brand" the same policy in a more attractive way, which assumes that Arab and other foreign publics are not reacting negatively to the substance of U.S. policy but only to its presentation. More basically, critics of this interview must not understand Obama at all. Obama likes negotiation and consensus-building, and he likes to try to explain one group’s situation to another. This is the peril of his bridge-building instinct that I mentioned long ago: the attempt to convey a message from one side to another is routinely mistaken as a concession to the other side. This is why some other conservatives (usually those who ended up voting for him) made a very different kind of mistake in assuming that Obama sympathized with certain conservative policy proposals that he did not dismiss out of hand. The claim that Obama represents a Rohrschach test, which I have seen so many people make, is really a statement about how badly the people making the claim misread what Obama tries to do. It’s not that Obama makes a secret of what he thinks or does not have a clear record on where he stands, but that very few people on either side of any given debate seem willing to believe that Barack Hussein Obama can really be as establishmentarian and conventional as he is. People project their own hopes and fears onto him not because he is a blank screen, but because they refuse to believe what they see when they look at his record and statements. Like his acceptance of national security ideology that I discussed last week, Obama’s establishmentarian instincts are an important part of the reason why he was able to win the election, but there is no reason to doubt that he will continue to follow such instincts just as he will keep adhering to the ideology of national security.
Larison's observations are far more reasonable than the hysterics of Quin Hillyer, which Larison references:
This... Blows....My...Mind
Jake Tapper has the story. Guess who B. Hussein Obama is doing his very first formal TV interview as president with? Just guess. If I'm an Israeli, I would run, not walk, early and often, to vote for Binyamn Netanyahu for president there, because there ain't no way that Obama is gonna support Israel when push comes to shove -- so, therefore, the Israelis will need their leader to be a guy who is willing to do the pushing and shoving on his own regardless of whether the American president gives his okay.
It baffles me how those of us on different sides of the ideological dividie can see things so differently.