CN finally catches up to Real Clear World in asking why Barack Obama chose Cairo to deliver a speech on American relations with the Muslim world. If we want to support democracy and self-determination, why deliver the speech in a country that rejects both? On the other hand, if Obama wants to distance himself from Israel, as Ben Wedeman suggests, why deliver the speech from a nation that many Muslims outside and inside of Egypt consider a pariah for having diplomatic relations with Israel?

Kevin Sullivan sees even more problems with this choice:

But while I’ve noticed some disagreement over the substance and purpose, I’ve heard very little about the choice of location. If the president really wants to address the so-called Muslim World (a questionable label, at best), wouldn’t it make sense to do so from the most populous Muslim country, one of the most prosperous, and arguably the most democratic?

The country I’m alluding to? Indonesia.

At least in Indonesia, we would have a setting in which “political Islam”, to use Kevin’s words, does not provide ruinous conditions for Muslims. Egypt, after all, is home to the Muslim Brotherhood, which was and is the precursor to groups such as al-Qaeda. The Brotherhood celebrated the outreach to Israel by assassinating its author, Anwar Sadat. Hosni Mubarak succeeded Sadat and is still in power as a dictator, directing a police state. It’s hardly a setting for an American President to offer the best of American values to the Muslim world.

A 30-minute speech is not going to make the Muslim world fall in love with America, although it certainly won’t hurt — as long as it’s not an opening bid in a process that winds up betraying the one West-looking democracy in the region, Israel. The issue in the Middle East isn’t Israel, anyway; it’s the kind of dictatorship that Egypt imposes on its people that creates extremism and violence, and Indonesia is one example of a Muslim nation that minimizes that problem through democracy and relatively open debate. An endorsement of Mubarak hurts more than it helps. It’s the location, not the speech itself, that makes no sense.

In the meantime, be sure to read A Peace to End All Peace in order to brush up on the history of the Middle East over the last 100 years. David Fromkin wrote this several years ago, but it remains one of the best and most readable histories of the series of blunders that brought us to this pass today. My friend and political opposite Shaun Mullen has an excellent review up at Kiko’s House after he took my book recommendation:

It is likely that the Middle East still would be as big a mess as it is without the meddling of the World War I victors, but at least the mess would have been self created and not foisted on the peoples of the region by imperialists who believed themselves and their cultures to be vastly superior.

That is the big takeaway from A Peace To End All Peace: Creating the Modern Middle East by David Fromkin, a weighty tome published in 1989 now out in a 20th anniversary edition that predates but anticipates the inability of the Clinton administration to craft a coherent policy for the region and inadvertent efforts of the Bush administration to further destabilize the region through the Iraq war. Britain, France and Italy, of course, had seen the sun set on their own empires decades earlier, leaving it to the U.S. to determinedly learn nothing from the past, including the lessons of the 1919 Paris conference, as the world’s remaining superpower.

“These three all-powerful, all-ignorant men, sitting there and carving up continents,” wrote a diplomat who observed U.S. President Woodrow Wilson, British Prime Minister David Lloyd George and French President Georges Clemenceau at work at the 1919 conference.

Obviously, I disagree with his application of lessons today — the US has to address the Middle East of today, not of 1917 — but Shaun’s review is great reading, as is the book itself.