Obama in the Middle East

President Obama met with King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia today on the first leg of a trip that's taking him to the Middle East and to Europe to commemorate D-Day on June 6. Obama started in Saudi Arabia because it is the cradle of Islam and the United States has long had a cozy relationship with the kingdom.
The highlight of the trip is going to be his stop on Thursday in Cairo to deliver what is supposed to be a major statement to the Muslim world about relations with the United States. In essence, his audience will be Muslims. According to NPR, the Obama administration mulled several possible countries before settling on Egypt as the site for this speech. He could have chosen Indonesia, the world's largest Muslim nation in terms of population and a fledgling democracy. It was also his home during the years after his mother married an Indonesian. He could have chosen Morocco, which is seen as moderate, modern Islamic country. But it is also rather far flung — and perhaps too much in the orbit of the West for the comfort of some conservative Muslims — to be ideal. He could have chosen Turkey, a Muslim-majority nation and a democracy. But like Indonesia, it is not Arab, and some thought that he had to address not only the nation's relationship to Muslims, but to Arabs. Egyptian dissident Saad Eddin Ibrahim said this morning on NPR that he would have preferred a less repressive government than the one of President Hosni Mubarak to host Obama.
At the same time Obama is making this gesture to Muslims, Osama bin Laden has resurfaced in a new audio recording to say, predictably, that the broadening of the conflict against the Taliban in Pakistan, which has displaced a million people, is inflaming hatred.
Obama has his work cut out for him in the Middle East. In my lifetime, and I'm just a little younger than the Seven-Day War, Israel and the Palestinian people have never seemed more far apart, more divided by unproductive rhetoric and actions designed to satisfy short-term interests but doom both sides to long-term misery. And let's face it, Obama has made rookie mistakes already in the region, from bowing to King Abdullah when they first met in April to lacking a forceful response to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's defiant continuation of settlement-building in the West Bank.
But Obama has something going for him when he addresses Muslims Thursday at Cairo University. He is a symbol of what a vibrant democracy can yield. Very few people in Egypt aspire to be president because President Mubarak has had a stranglehold on power since 1981. But a lot of Arab Muslims will see in Barak Obama a man born of modest means who through hard work and ambition now leads the United States. That's persuasive to a lot of disaffected Arab and Muslim youth, who suffer from very high unemployment and governments that refuse political and economic reform.