The effect of the Cairo speech was to undermine an ally, the president of Egypt, by going to his capital to speak over his head to Muslim people generally. This idea of an unmediated relationship between the president of the United States and the world’s Muslims was always in tension with traditional approaches to foreign policy. For the purposes of making policy, the many peoples of the world belong to states that are broken down into allies, rivals (friendly and less friendly), and enemies. But this is not how Obama sees the Middle East. Instead, he sees it in terms of an undifferentiated people who need to be convinced that the United States is unbigoted and indeed friendly toward their hopes and dreams.

The problem is that there is no such undifferentiated mass of people. Rather, there are a variety of Muslim sects (e.g., Sunni and Shia), countries (e.g., Iran and Saudi Arabia), and centers of power (e.g., regimes and opposition movements) with a wide array of interests that in many cases cannot be reconciled. Obama approached them all as if Pan-Islamism were alive and well, and not a discredited and failed ideology of half a century ago. ~Lee Smith

Thank goodness The Weekly Standard is on the case to tell us how diverse and complex the Islamic world is, because if there’s one thing that hawkish Republicans are known for it’s their keen grasp of subtle distinctions between different groups of Muslims.

This “pan-Islamist” claim is particularly galling when these are the sort of people who have encouraged the use of idiotic terms such as “Islamofascism” and continue to promote the falsehood that Iran and Al Qaeda are allies. Anti-jihadist hawks have long been the ones promoting the idea of Muslims-as-undifferentiated-mass, and they are the ones that have been conflating and collapsing different Muslim groups together for years. Now Smith is berating Obama for doing this. Smith must think that no one in his audience remembers anything that happened before last month.

What really bothers him about Obama’s responses is that they have not been identical in every situation, but have varied from case to case depending on the country involved. Obama seems to be making distinctions and paying attention to differences between countries, which is what drives Smith mad, but somehow Obama is also looking at the region through pan-Islamist glasses and doesn’t understand the region’s complexity. Even by the standards of knee-jerk hawkish criticism, this is a very poor argument.

As for the Cairo speech, critics at the time and afterwards argued that giving the speech in Cairo was an enormous gift of prestige to Mubarak and the Egyptian government. I don’t think there was very much to this, but until Smith wrote this column no one attempted to argue that the speech actually undermined Mubarak. For his part, Mubarak was reportedly very pleased with the speech, and publicly praised it. The administration may want to refer to the Cairo speech in a lame bid to take “credit” for what has happened in Egypt, but that doesn’t mean that the rest of us have to go along with it.