As long-time readers know, I have been willing to give Obama credit for his diplomatic moves and his interest in emphasizing conciliatory measures designed to thaw relations with a number of other states that the previous administration had treated mostly as adversaries and threats. I have had positive things to say about his approach towards Russia, his appearance at the Summit of the Americas and, with significant qualifications, even his speech in Cairo, but I cannot think of anything more misleading than to claim that the Lebanese election outcome was meaningfully influenced by the speech in Cairo.

Cynthia Tucker has claimed that the speech had some significant influence:

The president did, it seems, change some minds in the Middle East.

On Sunday, an American-aligned coalition won a surprising victory in Lebanon’s parliamentary elections, pushing back a challenge by Hezbollah, which had been widely expected to win a majority of seats. There were undoubtedly many factors at play — Lebanon’s politics are fractured and Byzantine — but Obama’s well-received speech has been credited with making a difference.

Let us think through this for a minute. Suppose for a moment that it is true that the speech “made a difference” and changed some minds in the region–why do we assume that a March 14 victory is proof of the speech’s influence? What possible connection is there? March 14 is a coalition that was very openly aligned with the previous administration and remains very closely aligned with Saudi interests. It was already the governing coalition. At most, voters stayed with the devils they knew. There had been expectations that they would be defeated, but pre-election predictions can often be mistaken, especially when they do not take increased turnout into account. Perhaps if turnout had remained lower, the outcome would have swung the other way, and Ms. Tucker would now be doing her best to persuade us that Obama’s speech had no influence on the opposition’s victory.

March 14 is a predominantly Druze and Sunni coalition supplemented for the most part by smaller Maronite and other Christian parties. Most everyone seems to agree that it was Aoun’s bungling during the campaign that alienated key Christian votes, who ran into the arms of the governing coalition. To the extent that one can imagine that the speech had any impact on the voting behavior of pivotal Christian voters, I suppose one might identify the reason for this influence on the passing remark Obama made about treatment of Maronites, which might have dovetailed with existing fears about Hizbullah, but it seems awfully strange that this remark would have worked to drive Christian voters away from the largest Christian political organization in the country.

Why else would Christian voters who backed March 14 rather than the opposition coalition, which included Michel Aoun‘s Free Patriotic Movement, have come away from a speech that was entirely about Islam and “the Muslim world” with any changed opinions about anything? This is the most generous explanation I can conjure up, and it is a real stretch. Is it not far more reasonable to assume that these voters ignored or simply didn’t care about Obama’s speech and based their decision to switch support to March 14 on their own distaste for Aoun’s cavorting with the Syrians and Iranians? Most of the commentary on Obama’s alleged influence on the Lebanese outcome seems to be little more than examples of the post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy at work. Lebanon had almost no place in Obama’s speech, much to my dissatisfaction, and except for the reference to the Maronites one would have to look very hard to find any statement that would have been relevant to Lebanese voters.

More to the point, Obama’s supporters and everyone who wants to see a diplomatic track with Iran succeed are doing themselves no favors by playing up the influence of the speech in Lebanon, when Iran figured much more prominently in Obama’s speech and the Iranian election seems unlikely to yield a similarly welcome surprise. If Ahmadinejad loses, it will be in large part because his pie-in-the-sky domestic spending program scarcely materialized, unemployment has worsened and economic conditions remain bad for his core supporters among Iran’s poor. He ran as a sort of economic populist, and has not delivered much to his voters. At the same time, he has played the buffoon in international affairs, which can hardly have helped his image at home. If he still manages to prevail because of the divided opposition, he will be able to claim vindication, and all of the people pushing this far-fetched claim about Obama’s influence in Lebanon will be at pains to say why Obama’s speech could help defeat Hizbullah but failed to do in the Iranian demagogue. The end result will be to judge the effectiveness of Obama’s speech by internal political events in other countries over which he could not possibly have any control and over which he has relatively little influence. It is a guaranteed way to set Obama up for failure, and as has happened so often it is his friends and allies who are doing this to him.