Newshoggers.com

The CBO Cudgel

By Fester:

The CBO has scored the HELP committee's full healtcare bill. The bill is the complete vision of what Senators Kennedy and Dodd want to do and it includes a reasonably strong public option, Medicaid expansion, comparative effectiveness research and an employer mandate. The goal is to expand coverage by a significant margin and introduce significant and well backed competition in regional health insurance markets that are overwhelmingly quasi-monopolosistic or duopolistic.

The CBO previously scored a partial version of the HELP framework that did not have the public option or the employer mandate in it. That partial scoring produced estimated costs of about 1 trillion dollars but with a significant portion of the population still uncovered. The marginal increase in coverage per dollar over the next decade was not good.

The new scoring of the bill that takes into account the actual coverage expansion and cost control measures is pretty damn impressive. From the AP:

The plan carries a 10-year price tag of slightly over $600 billion, and would lead toward an estimated 97 percent of all Americans having coverage, according to the Congressional Budget Office

Not a bad deal at all if we can get 97% coverage in even if there is a reasonable argument that the CBO score is a bit low as made by Jonathan Cohn. The real value of this CBO score with the complete HELP framework including the public option and the employer mandate is that it is a cudgel against the 'centrist' Democrats who don't want the public option overtly because it is 'too expensive' and potentially because it is a threat to major local employers and campaign contributors of regionally dominant health insurance providers. The public option is the best means of cost control and doing without it means a weaker bill for significantly more cost.

When Did The Af/Pak Policy Change?

By Steve Hynd

One of these things is not like the other.

Back in March, President Obama set out the broad outlines of his Af/Pak policy. One of the bright lines was supposedly that US forces in Afghanistan were not there to engage in long-term nation building. The US most definitely wasn't in Afghanistan so that in a decade or more at a cost of over a trillion dollars that nation could be bootstrapped up to the level of, say, Chad. Instead, the mission was twofold: to go after Al Qaeda and the Taliban's hardcore militants, disrupting safe havens and killing leaders, while giving Afghans the bare beginnings of providing for their own governance and security.

In his March speech, Obama was plain that a long-term COIN operation wasn't to be on the cards and that the US "surge" was to take the fight to the Taliban.

We are not in Afghanistan to control that country or to dictate its future. We are in Afghanistan to confront a common enemy that threatens the United States, our friends and allies, and the people of Afghanistan and Pakistan who have suffered the most at the hands of violent extremists.

So I want the American people to understand that we have a clear and focused goal: to disrupt, dismantle, and defeat al Qaeda in Pakistan and Afghanistan, and to prevent their return to either country in the future.

...I have already ordered the deployment of 17,000 troops that had been requested by General McKiernan for many months. These soldiers and Marines will take the fight to the Taliban in the south and east, and give us a greater capacity to partner with Afghan Security Forces and to go after insurgents along the border. This push will also help provide security in advance of the important presidential election in August.

At the same time, we will shift the emphasis of our mission to training and increasing the size of Afghan Security Forces, so that they can eventually take the lead in securing their country. That is how we will prepare Afghans to take responsibility for their security, and how we will ultimately be able to bring our troops home.

Sometime over the last few months, that mission has changed. Without informing the American people and wthout any real debate, the COINdinista interventionists have taken over and redirected Obama's policy. From the WaPo today:

Thousands of U.S. Marines descended upon the volatile Helmand River valley in helicopters and armored convoys early Thursday morning, mounting an operation that represents the first large-scale test of the U.S. military’s new counter-insurgency strategy in Afghanistan…

Once Marine units arrive in their designated towns and villages, they have been instructed to build and live in small outposts among the local population. The brigade’s commander, Brig. Gen. Lawrence D. Nicholson, said his Marines will focus their efforts on protecting civilians from the Taliban, and on restoring Afghan government services, instead of a series of hunt-and-kill missions against the insurgents.

Counter-insurgency "clear, hold and build" has entirely taken over from counter-terrorism "hunt, kill and disupt". That might be the right thing to do - although I have my doubts - but the point is that it wasn't what Obama said would happen and government policy has radically shifted in favor of an interventionist, long-war, nation-building policy straight from the military and the folks at CNAS without any official announcement or very much public debate. In fact, it's almost as if Obama himself hasn't been told.

Update: In comments over at VetVoice, commenter Ben says that one data point does not a trend make. Ben's critique correctly notes that there was going to be some COIN even in Obama's mainly CT-aimed original plan and so he asks how do might tell the difference from meagre evidence. But of course there isn't just one data point. There's been a continual stream of officers, wonks and policy officials - from Gates and McChrystal on down - saying that it's about civilian protection and nation building, not killing bad guys and getting out. The genesis of the change is easy to see too. CNAS' David Kilcullen has estimated another 10-15 years. Back in March, Eric Martin noted a CNAS report written by four of the leading COIN scholars arguing why a 5-10 year military/diplomatic commitment in Afghanistan was necessary.

Michael Cohen at Democracy Arsenal sees the same mission creep as I do.

And a new piece at The American Conservative details the alliance between Petraeus' COIN team and CNAS that has quietly changed Obama's Af/Pak policy.

Disappointment Doesn't Cover It

Commentary By Ron Beasley

To say I'm disappointed in Barack Obama is an understatement.  I'm beginning to think he has no ideology at all only a lust for political power.  He has chosen to not prosecute or even investigate the criminal wrong doings of the Bush/Cheney cabal and in fact in too many cases continued down the same path.  As we have reported here over and over his AF/Pak policy would make Bush and Cheney proud.  He had the opportunity to take on Wall Street and the over inflated financial industry and failed to do so.  He is making one mistake that George W. Bush never made - he's deferring to Congress and the US Congress can't really be trusted to do anything right.

And now we are seeing all of this at work in health care reform.  Katrina Vanden Heuvel:

God I hope David Broder is wrong. "The President has told visitors," the Washington Post columnist wrote last week, "that he would rather have 70 votes in the Senate for a bill that gives him 85 percent of what he wants rather than a 100 percent satisfactory bill that passes 52-48."

There is a reason the United States has two political parties, they have different ideologies.  This is not new - it's the same ideological conflict that John Adams and Thomas Jefferson were having over 200 years ago but as times changed it became even more pronounced.  I think that both Adams and Jefferson opposed an American royalty/oligarchy.  But oligarchs we have had and when they came to power the results have consistently been catastrophic.  The oligarchs are driven by greed for both power and money.  They gained control of the country in the early 20th century and the result was the Great Depression.  It took an FDR to set things straight and things went pretty well until 1981 when Ronald Reagan and the oligarchs once again took charge.  Once again the result was a massive failure of the economy.  The oligarchs and their political allies the Republicans suffered massive losses in 2006 and 2008.  Unfortunately Barack Obama is no FDR. 

The Republicans claim that the health insurance industry won't be able to compete with a public plan.  That's probably true since as Fester pointed out here  they have no competition in most markets now and as Josh Marshall explains this little fact gets little attention.  Seventy two percent of Americans support a public plan and that includes fifty percent of the Republicans.  But what do we get from the Obama administration?  This:

In an emailed statement to Bloomberg News, Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius said she’s open to the idea of dropping a public health insurance option in favor of a medical-insurance cooperative. “You could theoretically design a co-op plan that had the same attributes as a public plan,” Sebelius said.

The leading co-op proposal in the Senate, offered by Sen. Kent Conrad (D-ND), does not share the attributes of a public plan. Instead, Conrad’s proposal would create multiple state or regional non-profits as a competitor to the private insurance market. As Howard Dean has said of this plan: “The co-ops are too small to compete with the big, private insurance companies. They will kill the co-ops completely by undercutting them, using their financial clout to do it.”

Bloomberg’s Al Hunt asked Sebelius, “[If] you’re willing to compromise on your notion of a public plan…what’s non-negotiable?” Sebelius responded that the final bill has to “have a comprehensive approach that lowers costs.

Change?  Not so much - the oligarchs are still in charge.

Write your member of congress and tell them to vote no on any health care reform bill that doesn't include a  strong public plan.  Make it clear to Obama that we demand real change not bipartisan window dressing.

Obama, Like Bush, Wrong On Indefinite Detention

By Steve Hynd

A Pro-Publica report for the Washington Post which says that the Obama administration is drafting an executive order to reassert Bush's claimed presidential authority to lock up detainees forever without trial.

It's generating a lot of blogger comment, with rightwing posts being mostly along the lines of "see, we told you Bush was right" and leftwing posts being critical of Obama's plans and the very notion of indefinite detention.

The report is being described as a "trial balloon". Not to see if people will accept the idea of indefinite detentions - Obama has already said explicitly those will happen - but to see if doing an end-run around Congress to proclaim the right to do so by executive fiat will upset too many very important people.

I've nothing really to add to Glenn Greenwald's post on this report, and in particular this:

A government that will give you a trial before imprisoning you only where it knows ahead of time it will win -- and, where it doesn't know that, will just imprison you without a trial -- isn't a government that believes in due process.  It's one that believes in show trials.

This move is an abuse of authority and immoral at every level.

Obama has already foreited my (always sceptical) support - over his claims to secrecy, his abysmal Af/Pak non-plan, his denials of habeas rights and his continued torturing of the facts about Iran's nuclear program. My original fears have been proven justified, he's America's Tony Blair. Yes, he's better than John McCain or Hillary Clinton would have been in the Oval Office; that's a pretty low bar though, and not one that should garner progressives' uncritical support for a president who simply isn't very good at all.

The Oligarchs Are Winning

Commentary By Ron Beasley

Health Care reform is threatened and if we don't see major health care reform the Obama presidency will be a failure.  Robert Reich has some advice:

Momentum for universal health care is slowing dramatically on Capitol Hill. Moderates are worried, Republicans are digging in, and the medical-industrial complex is firing up its lobbying and propaganda machine.

[.....]

If you want to save universal health care, you must do several things, and soon:

And what does he need to do?

1. Go to the nation

2. Be LBJ. So far, Lyndon Johnson has been the only president to defeat American Medical Association and the rest of the medical-industrial complex.

3.  Forget the Republicans. Forget bipartisanship.

4.  Insist on a real public option. It's the lynchpin of universal health care.

5. Demand that taxes be raised on the wealthy to ensure that all Americans get affordable health care.

6.  Put everything else on hold. As important as they are, your other agenda items -- financial reform, home mortgage mitigation, cap-and-trade legislation -- pale in significance relative to universal health care.

 

 And Ezra Klein also had some good advice - Listen to the polls.

 

The public option is considered important by 76% of Americans.  Without a public option any plan will be a failure and Obama and the Democrats will pay the price and the Oligarchs will win.

Lucy's Football

By Fester:

Ian Welsh has the outline of the Senate Finance Committee’s health insurance plan. The shorter version of the short version is that it sucks. Here is the short version of the plan:

1) Lower the medicaid coverage rate from 150% to 100% of the Federal poverty line, 133% for kids and pregnant women (once you have the baby, too bad for you)

2) Subsidies stop at 300% of the poverty line (was 400%)

3) No Public Option mentioned

4) Insurance exchanges at the State level

5) Must buy insurance unless it costs more than 15% of your income

6) A fine if you don’t buy insurance unless you’re below the Federal poverty line

For the most part, as Walker discusses, this is actually identical to or slightly worse than the plan put forward by America’s Health Insurance Plans (AHIP). Yes, worse than the insurance industry’s plan. Remarkable. Baucus is really earning his campaign donations these days…. Without a public option, the insurance companies will have no check on their prices, let alone pressure to actually reduce them. Because people will be forced to buy bad insurance, they’ll hate the plan, and because “reform” has been passed, we’ll have to wait another 10 or 12 years for another shot....

Tim at Balloon Juice is very curious why Obama is not actively selling a strong public option proposal.

Watching Democrats try to fix health care I see a photo negative of the Bush years. Here is an issue with obvious urgency. Setting aside our shameful infant mortality rate, uninsured rate and other statistics, medical bills are by far the leading cause of personal bankruptcies. Insurer misconducy wrecks lives every day in every city in America. The right options are obvious and relatively few in number. Huge majorities support doing the right thing.

Even self-interest is similarly one sided. Remember how much Republicans invested in realigning the destroying Social Security? Imagine if they had an issue that would realign the country in their favor and instead of huge majorities violently hating it, most Americans strongly supported what they wanted to do. Republican strategists would give two of their first three kids for a shot at an issue with this much going for it....

I hear that Obama supports the public option. That would mean more if it felt even a little more urgent than his idea that we should have a college football playoff series.

Belaboring the obvious, people who care about what they’re doing normally enter negotiations with some firm goal in mind. Most would agree that it is moronic to make negotiating itself the point.

Many others, including Steve have noted that if a major and effective health financing reform bill passed with either a pathway to de facto single payer for baseline care or at least a strong public option, major fundraising avenues will be closed off to some of the current veto points in the Senate and the House. I think that is part of the problem with the Democrats.

However, I would like to get a little more cynical for a moment. What if healthcare reform is to Democrats what abortion and anti-feminism is to Republicans in that both are seem by significant portions of their respective bases as high salience issues that are best served by never fully addressing? Gotta keep the activists in line and ready to donate and phone bank for two more incremental steps in the 'right' direction instead of attempting to systemically change the constraints of power and the political process.

Tim is right that an effective public plan option would be a system changer that would effectively tilt the political playing field to Democrats for at least a generation or two in much the same way that Social Security and Medicare are high salience, high effectiveness boundary conditions for Democrats to lean on. However the Democrats who would benefit from these changes are not neccessarily the Democrats who are currently in power or more importantly, currently occupying critical blocking positions. So reform that can shave off several points of GDP on health expenditures, improve coverage and re-align US politics is not a winning solution for the key set of stakeholders; instead their winning solution is to do just enough to avoid overwhelming political costs and pressure.

The High Stakes Health Care Race

Commentary By Ron Beasley

The health care industry has a horse in the health care race but so do the Republicans, the Democrats and Obama. 

For the Republicans this race is about more than money - it's about survival.  If Obama and the Democrats get a public option it will be successful and popular.  The Republicans know this and that's why they are fighting it.  Of course there's the money to.  Robert Parry tells us to look at one of the most vocal critics of the public plan, Senator Grassley:

For instance, since 2005, Grassley’s various political action committees have collected nearly $1.3 million in donations from the industries related to the health insurance debate, according to OpenSecrets.org. Grassley’s top four donor groups were Health ($411,956); Insurance ($307,348); Pharmaceuticals ($233,850); and Hospitals ($197,137). Eighth on Grassley’s donor list were HMOs at $130,684.

If the Democrats and the Obama administration don't get at least a public plan the Obama administration will be seen as a failure.  Robert Reich rightly demands a "real" public health care option:

Here's the latest contortion from Senate Dems trying to win over a few Republicans to a "public option": Let nonprofits create healthcare cooperatives, then call them the public option. Kent Conrad, of North Dakota, chair of the Senate Budget Committee, came up with this bamboozle. Finance Committee chair Max Baucus, D-Mont., is impressed, and some Republicans — even Chuck Grassley of Iowa — seem interested. Watch your wallets.

Nonprofit healthcare cooperatives won't have any real bargaining leverage to get lower prices because they'll be too small and too numerous. Pharma and Insurance know they can roll them. That's why the Conrad compromise is getting a good reception from across the aisle, just as Olympia Snowe's "trigger" (whereby there's no public option until sometime down the pike, and only if Pharma and Insurance don't bring down costs and extend coverage a tad) is also gaining traction.

The truth is that there's only one "public option" that will truly bring down costs and premiums — one that's national in scale and combines its bargaining power with Medicare, and that's allowed to negotiate lower drug prices and lower doctor and hospital fees. And that's precisely what Pharma and Insurance detest, for exactly the same reason.

And then we have the insurance companies.  They know change is going to happen but maybe, just maybe they can turn it to their advantage.  Robert Parry again:

To understand the financial stakes involved in the battle over U.S. health-care reform, it’s useful to keep two numbers in mind: 50 million and 119 million.

The first number is the approximate total of Americans without health insurance, a new market that the private health insurance industry is salivating to get its hands on. The industry’s hope is that the government will mandate that those Americans sign up for private insurance and offer subsidies for those who can’t afford to pay the premiums.

Fifty million new customers and government largesse to help pay the bills would be a huge windfall for the insurance industry, which otherwise faces a decline in its market because Baby Boomers are reaching the age to qualify for Medicare and because rising unemployment is draining the pool of Americans who have insurance through their employers.

And the 119 million?  That's the number the insurance companies might lose to a real public option according to Senator Grassley.  And that's probably optimistic - a successful public option would probably eventually morph into single payer because the private insurance companies would not be able to compete.  So in this horse race there is no place or show -  it's win or nothing for the insurance companies.

So the question is how hard will Obama fight for the public option?  I wish I could be more optimistic.  The current economic crisis has left bankers about as popular as the H1N virus and the banking industry ripe for restructuring and regulation but we haven't seen it.  The insurance companies are even less popular and the socialized medicine ads are having little effect on public opinion I fear they are having an effect on the politicians.  You can forget about the economy and the wars health care will be the thing that makes or breaks the Obama presidency.

Update

While it appeared the conservative AMA came out in opposition to a public plan now they are saying maybe not:

The remarks came just several hours after the American Medical Association said it would oppose a public option for coverage. But in a reflection of just how delicate this debate has become, the 250,000 member physician group largely backtracked from its opposition later in the day.

"Make no mistake: health reform that covers the uninsured is AMA's top priority this year," a clarifying statement from the group read. "Every American deserves affordable, high-quality health care coverage.

"Today's New York Times story creates a false impression about the AMA's position on a public plan option in health care reform legislation. The AMA opposes any public plan that forces physicians to participate, expands the fiscally-challenged Medicare program or pays Medicare rates, but the AMA is willing to consider other variations of the public plan that are currently under discussion in Congress. This includes a federally chartered co-op health plan or a level playing field option for all plans. The AMA is working to achieve meaningful health reform this year and is ready to stand behind legislation that includes coverage options that work for patients and physicians."

Could this be a writing on the wall moment?

Local coins for COIN

By Fester:

Zenpundit earlier this month reviewed the Accidental Guerrilla by David Kilcullen and he noted one of the major problems in the entire COIN literature:

First, Kilcullen’s three principles are an operational and not a genuinely strategic doctrine. In fairness, no major COIN advocate has ever said otherwise and have often emphasized the point. The problem is that a lot of their intended audience - key civilian decision makers and opinion shapers in their 30’s-50’s often do not understand the difference, except for a minority who have learned from bitter experience. Most of those who have, the Kissingers, Brzezinskis, Shultzes etc. are elder statesmen on the far periphery of policy

This leads to a massive disconnect in planning, policy and goal sets, as operational goals (securing a modicum and 'decent' level of violence) overrides the minimally existent political constraints and goals. 

The 10 second description of the official US Army counter-insurgency doctrine is simple:

Enhance the host government's legitimacy and capability while denying legitimacy and capacity to the insurgent(s).

From this, everything else derives including the strong inclination to NOT using air strike, the argument that the best metric of success is not body counts but secured villages or neighborhoods.  This basic axiom should guide the actions of every leader from the E-4 fire team leader to the Secrtary of Defense and the President.  All actions that contribute to legitimacy and capacity enhancement of the host government are productive actions strategically.  All actions that do not aid in supporting legitimacy and capability are self-defeating actions. 

Time Magazine reports on the current US plan for Afghanistan.  It involves a surge of a few additional brigades, a doubling of the Afghani Army, increasing the national police force and expanding local militias.  There are many problems, including the dispersion of the legitimacy of violence to non-state militias, but there is a far more pragmatic concern of sustainability:

That's the reason the Obama Administration is considering doubling the size of Afghanistan's military and national police forces, to roughly 400,000. That's more than triple what U.S. officials had estimated would be needed to defend the country shortly after the U.S. invaded in late 2001....

But there's a problem with the option of doubling the size of the Afghan security forces: Officials inside and out of the Pentagon warn that the bill for setting up such a large force, estimated at $2 billion to $3 billion annually for several years, could prove daunting — more than double the budget of the Afghan government, and way more than could be sustained by Afghanistan's own economy for the foreseeable future.

Implied with this statement is that the current Afghanistani force structure is more expensive than the government's current budget.  So doubling the force structure either means the Kabul government will forever be a client government begging for outside funding to fund its oversized armed forces or it will be incapable of providing basic public services or it will be subject to the whims of the IMF and economic cycles that dwarf the Kabul government's capacity to influence.  None of those scenarios are legitimacy enhancing scenarios. 

The disconnect will lead to a minimization of political goals as our national decision loop short circuits itself to subjugating itself to the known processes instead of grappling with the needed questions as to what end states are achievable and desirable. 

Strategic Alliance

Commentary By Ron Beasley

From the NRO's crazy corner we have this:

The End of America’s Strategic Alliance with Israel?

From an Israeli perspective, Pres. Barack Obama’s speech today in Cairo was deeply disturbing. Both rhetorically and programmatically, Obama’s speech was a renunciation of America’s strategic alliance with Israel.

So what was that "special relationship"?  Often it was praise for what Israel said while ignoring what they actually did.  This line from Obama's speech in Cairo is important.

America will align our policies with those who pursue peace, and we will say in public what we say in private to Israelis and Palestinians and Arabs.

It's little wonder that the right wing Israeli's and their friends in the US are concerned.  Over at the Asia Times Ian Williams thinks Obama is laying a trap for Likud.

Whereas the Israelis only accepted the obligations of the road map with a whole list of exclusions that no other party has accepted, Obama reaffirmed that "the obligations that the parties have agreed to under the Road Map are clear ... Israelis must acknowledge that just as Israel's right to exist cannot be denied, neither can Palestine's. The United States does not accept the legitimacy of continued Israeli settlements. This construction violates previous agreements and undermines efforts to achieve peace. It is time for these settlements to stop."

It is worth remembering that his speech, while directed explicitly at the Muslim world, had "collateral" listeners. They include not just the Israeli factions but also their supporters in the United States, particularly in Congress where the American Israel Public Affairs Committee last week secured 329 signatures of members of Congress, for a letter calling on the administration to work "closely and privately" with Israel.

The Israeli government is clearly hurting, bewildered by the administration's refusal to emulate its predecessors in overlooking clear breaches of previous Israeli commitments. "Look what we say, not at what we do," has always been a cardinal principle of Israeli diplomacy - and it has been failing. Almost as close is the ability to get Israel's version of talks and meetings in the press as the definitive version. Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak told Israeli journalists this week that he had asked the US administration to cut back the briefings in which it laid out its policy, in effect leaving Israel to spin the results. Obama is unlikely to agree.

The protests from Israeli right-wingers about US interference in internal Israeli politics should raise some smiles from all sides in Washington, not least since they are paralleled by calls from other colleagues in the Knesset (parliament) for the lobby to get to work on Obama quickly.

But Obama's laidback rhetoric is a trap. It successfully entices Israeli hardliners to come out explicitly with their renunciation of the Road Map and the whole consensus, in a sense exposing themselves to American politicians who might otherwise be pressured into wrecking moves.

But the combination of Obama's popularity, not least with American Jewish voters, and the latter's exasperation with the neo-conservative/Likud alliance gives the White House some serious leverage to fight off such attempts to defang the new policy. However, the White House clearly knows what to expect, which is one reason for the nuance: firmly stating longstanding US official policy and restating Israeli promises while, so far eschewing overt condemnation and threats.

So what we may be seeing is the end of that "special relationship" that allowed the tail to wag the dog. 

Reactions To Obama's Speech In Cairo

By Steve Hynd

Over at Memeorandum, there's a mixed bag of reactions to Obama's speech calling for a new beginning between the US and Moslems.

Much of the American right seems to have considered it, as Powerline puts it, to have been that it was a "thoughtful, mostly non-controversial address, with a lot to like in it -- a speech that Americans of nearly all persuasions can be reasonably happy with." Ed Morrissey describes it as "surprisingly good". The full-time crazy haters, including Ed's boss Michelle, of course disagree. Not for the first time, I find myself wondering why Ed ever decided to take Malkin's money.

On the American left, Steve Benen described the speech as  "a president issuing a challenge, and forging a new basis for an international relationship" while Spencer Ackerman writes that "one of the most striking aspects of the speech was how it didn’t shy away from saying that America would continue to pursue actions in its interest that some Muslims may dislike". However,  Peter Daou is disappointed at the lack of substance in the speech, and ties that to Obama's failure to deliver campaign promises on Bush Rollback:

Is there an overarching purpose to Obama's speech? Is it to repair our image after eight years of a radical rightwing administration? Of course. But if the goal is to repair our image, then how about shunning the barbaric concept of indefinite detention? How about heeding the increasingly distressed calls of those who view the new administration's actions in the realm of civil liberties as a dangerous, disturbing, and precedent-setting affirmation of Bush's worst excesses?

If we are to fix America's image in the world and if we are to heal the planet's myriad ills, it will not be done through contrite kumbaya speeches about how we are all one world and how we should all coexist peacefully, no matter whether the remarks are delivered in Cleveland or Cairo. It will be done by leading through example, by righting the many wrongs here at home, by seeking justice and fairness for all, by doing what is right, not saying what sounds pleasing to the media elite and the pliable punditocracy.

Shirin Sadeghi writes that Obama's speech was for the rulers, not the ruled:

Merely speaking words like "the situation for the Palestinian people is intolerable" or "civilization's debt to Islam" is important and necessary and Obama deserves praise for providing these nuggets of appreciation and historical perspective.

But his words today were more useful to the governments with whom the United States must engage during his administration - governments like Egypt, Saudi Arabia, The Islamic Republic of Pakistan and the Islamic Republic of Iran, all of whom have a severely problematic regard for the rights of their people - than for the Muslim people whose living reality is too often stained by insufficient power to improve their lives.

And Sadeghi's opinion appears to borne out by official regional reactions as collected by the BBC.

Anthony Shadid wrote from Haditha for the WaPo yesterday, saying that the common people of the Moslem world hoped Obama would " deliver something far more than the unfulfilled pledges of Bush's speeches". This speech, though, wasn't it. Not yet.