Obama hit a number of extremely important points today in his speech to the Muslim world, but the most salient was one phrase toward the end that I'd like to draw your attention to.
The following quote is a powerful rebuke to neoconservative ideology, one that will, more than anything else that Obama said today, help to forge a new path in middle east foreign policy.
I know there are many, Muslim and non-Muslim, who question whether we can forge this new beginning. Some are eager to stoke the flames of division and stand in the way of progress. Some suggest that it isnt worth the effort; that we are fated to disagree, and civilizations are doomed to clash...
But if we choose to be bound by the past, we will never move forward.
The meme of a "Clash of Civilizations", as some of you may know, comes from Samuel P. Huntington, an academic my Political Science in the Middle East professor lovingly referred to as a "sellout" and a "hack".
In a speech to the American Enterprise Institute in the early 90s, expanded to an often-cited article in Foreign Affairs and later an entire book, posits that, following the "End of History" (another intellectually bankrupt meme started by Francis Fukuyama following the collapse of the Soviet Union), the fault lines in global conflicts would no longer be over territory, national identity, ideology, or economics.
Instead, according to Huntington, future conflicts would be clashes of "civilizations", a term which he never clearly defines, but includes race, culture, and religion.
In his book, Huntington takes a stab at mapping out the various "civilizations" based on these factors. Take a look for yourself. I'm not here to decide whether or not his dividing lines are accurate or have merit. That's not the point.
The point is that this idiotic meme was latched on to and embraced by these people, who in turn used its main premise to give birth to even dumber and more explicitly bigoted memes, like "Islamofascism" or the "War on Terror".
BushCo, whether for cynical reasons or just sheer stupidity, really believed in this idea of a "clash of civilizations". It's what brought Bush the Lesser to believe that Western cultural hegemony was the only path to peace in the Middle East, because our "civilizations" are somehow incompatible.
Obama rejected this in powerful and moving terms today by linking the cultural and social achievements of the Muslim world to America, by making the case that our civilizations are not only compatible, but indeed bound to one another inextricably.
He made the case more powerful through a history lesson, as he often does. With the passages in his speech about the Founding Fathers' respect for Islam, he forged a new narrative, one that suggests that there need not be any clash of civilizations whatsoever, and indeed that the greatness of our respective civilizations is what brings us together, not what drives us apart.
I'm sure that plenty of commentors will dismiss this as only rhetoric, and I agree that our President is still taking bad advice as far as foreign policy in the Middle East is concerned, but I believe the rhetorical framing of his speech today was extremely important, and substantive in its own right.
Oh yeah, and hearing a bunch of Egyptians chanting "USA! USA!"? Priceless.
UPDATE Many more people than I expected are choosing "yes" in the poll. I'd like to invite those people to counter my perceptions of Huntington's ideas. Really! I do enjoy a rousing debate.