Thoughts on Obama & Egypt

After anywhere from 500,000 to 2 million people crowded the streets of Cairo today, President Mubarak got at least part of the message: he took to state TV to announce that he will not seek reelection. If electoral reform was the end-goal for all of these protesters over the past week or two, today would have been a glorious occasion. But the Egyptian people don’t want to wait for Mubarak to simply wait out his term — they want him gone.

And slowly, it seems President Obama is reaching the same conclusions. From the get-go, he has not given his full public support for either the protesters or Mubarak. Now, there are plenty of tricky considerations at play here, from the Israeli-Egyptian peace treaty to the US’s calls for democracy in the Middle East to US foreign aid (of which Egypt receives the second most of any country behind Israel).

But in Obama’s speech in Cairo in the summer of 2009, he called for the “cycle of suspicion and discord” between the Arab world and America to end. The US’s support of a strongman like Mubarak surely feeds that cycle in the minds of the same young Egyptians who are calling for his removal. So I applaud Obama if, as recent accounts suggest, he has called on Mubarak not to seek reelection, and perhaps even to step down. We can’t expect the president to publicly call for Mubarak’s resignation given the aforementioned circumstances, but behind the scenes, I hope he has been strong in the face of the entrenched Egyptian leader.

As the protests continue (as they surely will), we can only wait and see how President Obama handles the situation. Here’s hoping he continues a calm but persistent effort to see true democracy come to our Middle Eastern ally.