Obama's speech fails to improve US image among Arabs
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President Barack Obama once again reached out to the Arab nations in a televised speech on Thursday, but some experts said the address may have achieved little in reversing the region's anti-U.S. sentiments.
The Arab world's longstanding anger and mistrust toward Washington stem from a number of causes, from the Iraq war to perceptions of U.S. goals in the Middle East and North Africa.
"I don't think this is going to create a lot of optimism," said Steven Kull, political psychologist with the Program on International Policy Attitudes at the University of Maryland.
One major reason has to do with the conflict between the Israelis and Palestinians: Obama on Thursday called for a "non-militarized" Palestine, which Palestinians -and the rest of the Arab world- are likely to view as a compromise on sovereignty.
Indeed, the Israel-Palestinian conflict is a major source of unfavorable views toward the United States, as Muslims perceive the issue as a symbol of how the West discriminates against Muslims, analysts said.
At the same time, there exists a strong Arab perception that Washington has the capacity to prompt Israel to move on a peace deal, but has not done so. And that has bred Arab frustration toward the United States.
Wayne White, former deputy director of the U.S. State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research's Office of Analysis for the Near East and South Asia, said the speech was an attempt to straddle a number of different fences, as the president was addressing European, American, Asian and Arab audiences.
"And that was a very difficult balancing act. (The speech) therefore comes off as sort of a compromise," he said.
"Within the speech was a balance of U.S. national interests and then the desire to back the aspirations of the so-called Arab Spring and it didn't completely come off the way people in the region would really want," he said.
Aside from the speech, the Palestinians are expected to bring a resolution for statehood before the United Nations in September, which every country except for the United States and Israel is expected to vote in favor of, said Wendy Chamberlin, president of the Middle East Institute, at a panel discussion in Washington on Wednesday. And that could bode ill for the U.S. image in the region.
Over the last two years, Obama has made efforts to reach out to the Muslim world, most notably in a speech from Cairo in June 2009, in which he called for better mutual understanding between the United States and the Muslim world.
But as views of the United States improved in many countries after Obama's election, they remained largely static in the Muslim world, with majorities in many countries holding a cynical view of that country.
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