Soccer Dad

The non-freedom agenda

George W. Bush claimed to have had a "freedom agenda." His successor, President Obama has made a point of departing from the policies of predecessor. He's done it in a number of ways.

Fouad Ajami explains why President Obama's mea culpas to the Arab world - about President Bush and America in general - haven't worked in The Arabs Have Stopped Applauding Obama:

Steeped in an overarching idea of American guilt, Mr. Obama and his lieutenants offered nothing less than a doctrine, and a policy, of American penance. No one told Mr. Obama that the Islamic world, where American power is engaged and so dangerously exposed, it is considered bad form, nay a great moral lapse, to speak ill of one's own tribe when in the midst, and in the lands, of others.

The crowd may have applauded the cavalier way the new steward of American power referred to his predecessor, but in the privacy of their own language they doubtless wondered about his character and his fidelity. "My brother and I against my cousin, my cousin and I against the stranger," goes one of the Arab world's most honored maxims. The stranger who came into their midst and spoke badly of his own was destined to become an object of suspicion.

If President Obama was ashamed of the country he represented, then he also wouldn't be willing to promote its virtue: freedom. As Jackson Diehl observes in The deflated Arab hopes for Obama:

But they are not the only victims of post-Cairo letdown. Arab reformers, who for most of this decade have been trying to break down the barriers to social and political modernization in the Middle East, have also begun to conclude that the Obama administration is more likely to harm than to help them.

"All Arab countries are craving change -- and many of us believed Obama was a tool for change," says Aseel al- Awadhi, a Kuwaiti member of parliament. "Now we are losing that hope."

Awadhi, one of four women elected to Kuwait's parliament this year, is part of a movement that the Bush administration loudly promoted and sporadically attempted to help -- though the effort steadily waned during George W. Bush's second term. The Obama administration, in contrast, often speaks as if it does not recognize the existence of an Arab reform movement. Bush's frequently articulated argument that political and social liberalization offer the best antidote to Islamic extremism appears absent from this administration's thinking.

One would think that "social liberalization" would be one of the goals of the Obama administration, given his efforts at home. But since that would require adopting policies embraced (though not necessarily all the time) of his predecessor, President Obama's heart is with the hooligans.