Obama in Cairo

I have no doubt that Barack Obama’s speech in Cairo today will not have gone down well amongst American conservatives. In fact many of them will be appalled by it. How long before someone in the right-wing blogosphere writes something about how terrible, if unsurprising, it was to see an American President protstrate himself in such humiliating fashion. All the right’s worst fears have com to pass! It’s like Jimmy Carter has returned to the White House!

And, I guess, you could pull some lines from the speech that made it seem as though Obama was “apologising” for the United States while rarely putting as much emphasis on the sins of the muslim world. But that would be to miss the point: the arab and muslim worlds don’t need to be lectured by the United States, they need to be engaged. And that was Obama’s point. In fact, reading his speech, you’d describe it as a talk rather than a speech and certainly not as a lecture.