United States President Barack Obama’s June 4 speech from Cairo did not contain specifics. Most wise men had underscored that the charismatic statesman should dwell on values rather than wade into the dangerous world of specifics.
Which indeed was the safe route for a great orator like Mr. Obama. Values resonate in his magnificent voice. Besides, grand speeches could hardly be a good platform for policymaking. However, substance, fresh substance, and lots of it — that was what the Middle Easterners impatiently sought to hear. With Levantine wisdom, prominent Arab columnist Rami Khouri wrote as the countdown began for Mr. Obama’s speech: “No offense, but nobody in the Middle East really cares about Obama’s ancestors or youth years, or his views on other religions. What we care about — and what the U.S. President should explain on this trip — is whether the U.S. government believes that habeas corpus and the Fourth Geneva Convention, for example, apply with equal force to Arabs as well as to Israelis.”
Equally, for southwest Asians tuning in to the Cairo speech, the intriguing question was what Mr. Obama would offer by way of renewed momentum to his AfPak strategy, which vacillates between failure and avoidance of failure. What the U.S. desperately needs is a big idea that can propel the AfPak strategy over the stony, steep ridge into the lush green valley that may lie beyond. Cairo could just have been the platform to introduce such an idea.
But it didn’t happen, although the idea exists. The time has come for the U.S. to take a serious look at the grand idea of a natural gas pipeline project, leading from Iran’s gigantic, untapped South Pars fields to Pakistan and on to India and extending through the Indo-Gangetic plains all the way to China’s heavily populated south-eastern provinces.
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