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June 5, 2009 | It was the most important speech of Barack Obama's young presidency. And he delivered big-time.

President Obama faced a daunting task in Cairo. He urgently needed to hit the reset button on relations between the U.S. and the Arab/Muslim world. Repairing a relationship that has been fraught with suspicion, misunderstandings and enmity for decades requires addressing many painful and complex issues. Above all, however, it meant confronting two critical ones -- the "war on terror" and the Israeli-Palestinian crisis. George W. Bush's "war on terror," which culminated in his invasion of Iraq, foolishly treated all militant Islamist groups as America's enemies and made the paranoid neoconservative idea of a "clash of civilizations" a self-fulfilling...