Our future is bound to the Mideast, North Africa

Our future is bound to the Mideast, North Africa

In a major speech intended to reframe U.S. policy in the Middle East, President Barack Obama said Thursday that the future of the United States is bound to region by the forces of economics, security, history and fate.

Obama opened the speech by explaining why the region matters to America, even though the countries of the Middle East and North Africa "may be a great distance from our shores."

Reset relations
In the much-anticipated "Arab spring" speech, Obama will try to reset relations with the Middle East, but his outreach could falter amid Arab frustration over an uneven U.S. response to the region's revolts and his failure to advance Israeli-Palestinian peacemaking.

Obama is expected to unveil new economic aid packages to bolster political transitions in Egypt and Tunisia.

The president plans to forgive roughly $1 billion in debt owed by Egypt to free up money for job-creation efforts there. Additionally, he will reveal other steps to bolster loans, trade and international support in Egypt and in Tunisia, where uprisings led to dictators being overturned.

Additionally, the president is expected to nudge autocratic allies like Yemen and Bahrain to undertake reforms and harden his line against Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.

Obama was expected to sharply defend new sanctions on Assad as the U.S. government toughens its message for the repressive leader: Embrace democracy or get out.

'Beginning to turn the page'
Struggling to regain the initiative in a week of intense Middle East diplomacy, Obama is seizing what the White House called a "window of opportunity" in the wake of the death of Osama bin Laden at the hands of U.S. Navy SEALs.

"Having wound down the Iraq war ... and having taken out Osama bin Laden, we are beginning to turn the page to a more positive and hopeful future for U.S. policy in the region," a senior administration official told reporters in previewing parts of the president's speech.

Obama aims to articulate a more coherent approach for dealing with unprecedented political upheaval that has swept the Middle East and North Africa in recent months, upending decades of U.S. diplomatic assumptions.
First Read: Previewing Obama's speech

His speech is meant to counter criticism that he has been slow and inconsistent in responding to the swirl of events.

But he is not expected to stray far from his approach of balancing support for democratic aspirations with a desire to preserve longtime partnerships seen as crucial to fighting al-Qaida, containing Iran and securing vital oil supplies.

However, the risk for Obama is that his policy blueprint, calibrated for an audience ranging from the Arab masses to Middle Eastern leaders to the American public and lawmakers, will be too vague and nuanced to satisfy any of them.

Easier to predict is that he will stoke Arab disappointment with what will be left out — fresh U.S. proposals for breaking the impasse between Israel and the Palestinians.

The decades-old conflict remains a central preoccupation of the Arab world.

While Obama will renew his call for the two sides to return to the table after talks broke down late last year over Israeli settlement building in the occupied West Bank, his push is not expected to be forceful enough to revive negotiations.

Neither is any significant progress expected when Obama holds talks on Friday with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, with whom he has had a strained relationship.

Glow fades after Cairo speech?
Obama had raised hopes with his 2009 speech in Cairo promising a "new beginning" with the Muslim world after years of estrangement under his predecessor, George W. Bush.

Unlike Obama's Cairo speech, Thursday's address will focus on new flashpoints in the Arab world. He is not expected to use the chance to present an overarching strategy to supplant the case-by-case response he has applied so far, aides say.

"It won't be a one-size-fits all policy from the United States, but it will be a recognition that we need pragmatically to see that change is coming and try to shape it," said Brian Katulis of the Center for American Progress in Washington.

The administration's announcement on Wednesday of its first sanctions directly targeting Assad over Syria's violent crackdown on protests was seen in part as an attempt to quell criticism that Washington was responding too cautiously.

Obama's domestic opponents have also accused him of acting too timidly in Libya to break the stalemate between Muammar Gaddafi and rebels trying to oust him, and of not being tough enough with autocratic allies in Yemen and Bahrain.

Trying to show reform efforts will not go unrewarded, Obama will use his speech to unveil aid plans for Egypt and Tunisia, where longtime rulers were toppled by popular revolts.
Source:msn

Osama bin Laden dead

Osama bin Laden dead

"Justice has been done," President Obama says in a televised speech to the nation. Bin Laden, mastermind behind the Sept. 11 attacks and Al Qaeda leader, was killed by a CIA-led team at a compound inside Pakistan

A CIA-led team killed Osama Bin Laden at a compound inside Pakistan Sunday and recovered his body, bringing a close to the world's highest-profile manhunt after a decade-long search, President Obama announced to the world Sunday night.

"Justice has been done," the President said solemnly in a hastily-arranged late night TV address from the East Room of the White House. Bin Laden, he said, "murdered thousands of innocent men, women and children" and his death was "the most significant achievement to date" in the U.S. war against the al Qaeda, terrorist network that bin Laden founded, led and inspired.
As described by the President and top administration officials, the successful effort to track down bin Laden centered on a man whom the officials described as a trusted courier for al Qaeda, a protégé of Khalid Sheik Muhammed, the operational mastermind of the Sept. 11 attacks. Obama said that after he entered the White House in 2009, he had ordered CIA director Leon Panetta to make the killing or capture of Bin Laden the "top priority of our war against al Qaeda." Then, in August, he was briefed on "a possible lead" to the elusive terrorist's hiding place. "It took many months to run this thread to ground," he said.

By Friday, a senior White House official said, the evidence had become sufficiently certain that Obama was able to give the go-ahead for the operation.

After years of rumors that the world's most-wanted man was hiding in the caves and rugged redoubts of the Pakistan- Afghanistan border region, the CIA ultimately found him hiding in what officials described as a comfortable mansion surrounded by a high wall in a small town near Islamabad, Pakistan's capital.

On Sunday, a "small team" of Americans raided the compound. After a firefight, the president said, they killed Bin Laden. No Americans were injured in the raid.

Other officials said DNA tests had confirmed Bin Laden's identity.

Obama praised the joint efforts of U.S. and Pakistani intelligence, and appealed to Muslims around the globe to support the U.S. action.

"Bin Laden was not a Muslim leader," he said. "He was a mass murderer of Muslims."

Vice President Biden and CIA director Leon Panetta had called members of Congress and leaders around the world earlier Sunday night to break the long-awaited news.

As the first word of Bin Laden's death leaked out, a jubilant and fast-growing crowd gathered outside the White House. The throng waved flags, chanted "USA! USA!," and sang the "Star Spangled Banner."

The news came months before the tenth anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, which were orchestrated by Al Qaeda. More than 3,000 people were killed

The horrifying attacks set off a chain of events that led the United States into wars in Afghanistan, and then Iraq. As the nation girded for more attacks, America's entire intelligence system was overhauled to counter the threat of terrorist bombs or other attacks at home.

Al Qaeda also was blamed for the 1998 bombings of two U.S. embassies in Africa that killed 231 people and the 2000 attack on the USS Cole that killed 17 American sailors in Yemen, as well as countless other plots, some successful and some foiled. It has generated local organizations in hot spots from Iraq to Afghanistan.

Panetta, the CIA director, said as recently as last summer that the United States had not obtained reliable intelligence about bin Laden's location for almost a decade.

Bin Laden first drew attention in the 1980s, when he drew on his family's vast fortune to build hospitals, mosques and other facilities to help support Afghans then fighting Soviet troops in Afghanistan. The CIA considered him a financier, not a terrorist leader.

In 1991, Bin Laden bitterly opposed the introduction of U.S. troops onto bases in Saudi Arabia during the run-up to the first Persian Gulf War, which ousted Saddam Hussein's Iraqi troops from Kuwait.

His fiery sermons demonized the Saudi rulers, and infidel Westerners, and soon attracted like-minded extremists to Al Qaeda.

The CIA has been on bin Laden's trail since the mid-1990s, when it set up a separate intelligence unit to penetrate his organization and track his whereabouts.

After the embassy bombings in 1998, the Clinton administration undertook several intelligence and military operations aimed at killing him, including one in which cruise missile attacks were ordered against al Qaeda training camps in Afghanistan. All failed.

Al Qaeda's ranks have been badly depleted in recent years and Bin Laden's death deprives the organization of its most charismatic and important leader. It leaves Ayman al Zawahri, an Egyptian physician and Islamist ideologue, as the putative leader.

Analysts said the result is likely to accelerate the fracturing of militant groups loosely associated with al Qaeda, especially in the Middle East, that have taken their inspiration from bin Laden's call for attacks on the U.S. and its allies for the more than a decade.

It was Bin Laden's fervent call for attacks on the U.S.--which he referred to as the "far enemy"--and al Qaeda's ability to recruit and train operatives from its sanctuary in Afghanistan that led to some of the world's deadliest terrorist attacks.

Though the U.S. had made plans to hold and interrogate bin Laden if he was captured, most U.S. officials assumed that he would never be taken alive.

"You're talking about a hypothetical that will never occur," said Attorney General Eric H. Holder when asked in early 2010 if bin Laden would enjoy constitutional protections. "The reality is that we will be reading Miranda rights to the corpse of Osama bin Laden. He will never appear in an American courtroom."
Source:Latimes