Arab Writer Finds Obama Scary for the Moderates, Reassuring for the Radicals

Barry Rubin
The Rubin Report
06 December 09

Here’s a remarkable article from Michael Young of the Beirut Daily Star that tells you more about what’s happening in the world than anything you’ll read in the Western media. To give you a clear sense of the contents the title is, “Barack and Hassan concur, the US is waning.”

It begins:

“It’s not often that Barack Obama and Hassan Nasrallah [the leader of Lebanese Hizballah, a Lebanese Islamist group backed by Iran and Syria] agree, but both made important speeches this week, and both appeared to concur that American power was on the decline.”

The reference is to the president’s speech at West Point, which Young sees as gloomy and pessimistic, highlighting American problems and disunity; economic weaknesses; and eagerness to withdraw U.S. troops from Afghanistan (though he is sending some more soldiers there temporarily).

Young continues:

“Listening to Hassan Nasrallah gloat at the weakness of the United States, you had to wonder if the U.S .president misses the point. Power and success are in many respects fruits of perception. Just look at Nasrallah himself, who persuaded many a fool that the hecatomb of 2006 was a divine victory for Lebanon. Modesty in the exercise of foreign policy is a bad idea, particularly for the leader of the world’s most powerful country whose destabilization, whether we like it or not, only destabilizes the global political and economic order.”

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