cairo speech

What did the human-rights-promotion community think about the Cairo speech? According to vanguard organization Human Rights Watch’s official statement, emailed to me at 4:14 p.m. yesterday, not such great things. This release was titled “U.S./Egypt: Obama Dodged Rights Issue: Generalities Failed to Send Tough Message on Mideast Repression.”
President Barack Obama’s speech on June 4, 2009 [...]

A little over a year ago, I spent some time with the Obama campaign’s foreign policy brain trust to glean the emerging preoccupations of his advisers. There were two overarching themes: first, the meta-idea that Obama would expand the realm of the possible in foreign policy by rejecting the typical frameworks of Washington debate; and [...]

In August 2006, after the U.K. thwarted terror attacks planned by al-Qaeda-inspired fanatics, George W. Bush remarked that the U.S. and its allies were “at war with Islamic fascists.” Bush’s use of the term, previously limited primarily to the sweatier precincts of the right-wing blogosphere, struck Muslims as deeply offensive, heralding an era in which [...]

There’s so much to say about President Obama’s historic speech in Cairo today. But for now, I want to focus on the aspects of it that conservatives insisted wouldn’t exist. Sean Hannity, for one, blasted the exercise yesterday as an “apology tour,” and while the facts of the speech won’t get in the way of [...]