every day but the middle east and we're going to get some updates wandering around the region and some analysis of what's going on and joining us once again is our almost resident expert on the middle east professor  university joel welcome back to other voices thank you very much paul it's always good to be here yeah we were just talking before we went on that this program has now been on the air close to seventeen years and you were our very first guest and we're talking to a lot of these same issues seven were two rockets fired on the southern suburbs of beirut they are the stronghold of hezbollah and my guess no one has taken credit and the perpetrators haven't been arrested as far as we know is that this is payback for his the law taking a more active role on the side of the us side regime in supporting it especially in the fighting that is going on around the city the town of qusayr which is in the north of lebanon just on the border with syria as of course there is actually in syria but it's on the border with lebanon and you were in the airport when i was in the airport when the rockets were fired i saw the news of it on the lebanese t v it was a little confusing because i wasn't expecting exactly that so the me awhile to figure out exactly what it was all about and i was glad to be getting on the plane at that moment is syria main topic of conversation among people in lebanon oh yes oh yes and are they worried about it the war spilling over they are indeed and it already had already well with the rockets and the rockets but also the week before i arrived  when did i arrive i arrived on may twenty second i think it was in the week before that already there was fighting in the northern lebanese city of tripoli tripoli is a mainly sunni muslim  city so therefore most of the sunni muslims back opposition to the also the regime and also has a small but significant alawite population most of the alawite backed the regime main figures of the regime including also himself are white and by now there are eight people reported dead and that fighting which has not ceased ok we're getting a little sign from the audience if you could speak up a little bit where we are not amplified what let's let's will will return to that in a minute but while we're on syria there is some breaking news this evening as we go on air on june fourth again this program is repeated throughout the month so this is not as timely if you're watching on june thirtieth but what was being reported of them lauren fabulous the french foreign minister announced just a few hours ago that the french government has decided that it has definitive proof that the syrian government has used sarin gas against the rebels obama administration has said it's not so sure the united nations already said several days ago that they believe that both sides have used chemical weapons which is quite conceivably true well this brings up president obama's infamous red line and that's that's what makes this news was  some months ago he said that if there was proof of the use of chemical weapons that would constitute a red line he he did not say but the implication but he did not say what was across that red line but presumably  sort of direct u s intervention maybe at least arming the rebels well that that decision has already been made that there have has been a decision to supply  lethal assistance to the rebels there's still a problem about who to give it to there's absolutely no way despite chatter mccain's visit there recently where he used to claim that he knows exactly who should get the weapons there's no way to make sure that the people who you want to get the weapons get them but even beyond that there does not appear to be a military solution to the conflict at this point  most of the people who i spoke to in syria including people like yours eads whose specialty is military analysis said the regime can't be defeated that doesn't mean they can win but they can't be defeated so we might be looking at a very protected and very bloody stalemate there that's already happened in the region there was a civil war in lebanon for fifteen years very destructive this would be equally destructive and is already in the range of eighty thousand people dead syrian society has all but been destroyed it will be a very long time if the finding stop tomorrow to rebuild it  ama is very wise to stay out of it as long as he can and i would hope forever because there is zero good outcome that can result from any kind of high profile american intervention there the united states already has a lot of enemies in the region whatever it does in syria it's going to have more enemies in the region neither side is a paragon of goodness  so rather i mean of course it's an ugly brutal regime we should have no illusions about that but american intervention is not the solution to involved in this and is calling for a political solution and so let's look at the possibility that a assad has already said there's no political solution to this he's not going anywhere he's to run for president again next year be obama when this first started said that assad must go and the peace conference that john kerry is working on with the russians is predicated on the first step of being assad going where does that leave any hope for a political solution if there is no right  whether the opposition will or won't agreed to come if it isn't a precondition goes part of the problem is that the opposition is not united and the opposition are not such wonderful people either main force of the opposition is the muslim brothers we have a pretty good idea of what they might be like look we go across the region to egypt and see what they're doing there it's not very happy  there is of course the no store front which is the al qaeda affiliate and there are all of these people civilians who are not armed who were in fact the main force behind the original protest against the regime simply been overwhelmed because them got guns so there was a report in b b c news today that said we shouldn't be talking about the free syrian army because they're not an army they're not disciplined they don't have anything a structured command we should instead be calling them men with guns and the only thing that unites them is that when they fire those guns they are more or less firing in the same direction so you know political leadership of the opposition but the syrian national council is not united the muslim brothers are the largest factor there too they have recently let some more secular looking people  years the only organized opposition all political force so it's not surprising that when there is a crack in the regime there are the ones who are most able to step forward and stand as the enemies in the middle east not that the u s is lacking in people despise our presence there what about substantial increase in humanitarian aid  and i'm sure you learned about the effects of that lebanon lot of the refugees are there turkey in the midst of all this turbulence still dealing with hundreds of thousands of refugees in their country there are hundreds of thousands of syrian refugees in turkey in lebanon in jordan in jordan the refugee situation is coming very close to the stabilizing the country because there have already been in jordan really since the popular uprisings of twenty eleven but renewed in the last months serious demonstrations against the regime on economic and social basis then come these hundreds of thousand syrian refugees and they're willing to work for half the price of any journey and because things to feel their families and feed their families will jordanians who are already complaining about prices are high and there is high unemployment and so forth are in big trouble so yeah he managed tarion assistance would be a very good thing the red cross however has been complaining that the regime will not let the red cross into the various places that it wants to go to provide  found a quote from our new secretary of state john kerry from one month ago where is urging israel and turkey to reestablish diplomatic relations because he quote sees israel turkey and jordan as the stability in a very turbulent region that good call on that one last look very precious real or uprising in bowing throughout most of the thirty's or turkey over the last several day or no one saw that coming now even fair enough that's right but i mean underlying all of this and this is something that no american administration is going to be prepared to acknowledge underlying all of this is since the one nine hundred eighty s in egypt case even late one nine hundred seventy s there has been a concerted effort to restructure the economies of the entire middle east and north africa region along the lines of what has been called the washington consensus neo liberal policies advocated by the unholy trinity the international monetary fund the world bank and the general agreement on tariffs and tra generally speaking what is involved there is reducing or eliminating altogether government subsidies on food and other widely used commodities cutting the budget deficit reducing t putting your national currency on international basis that it's not protected in its trade internationally basically completely opening up your economy to the global capitalist economy on the theory that  this will enable you to export and that your car will grow well this is true if you take the case of egypt a new government was installed in july of two thousand and four and its mandate was to accelerate all of those policies which were already underway since one thousand nine hundred one in egypt and in two thousand and seven eight and nine egypt was praised as one of the top ten best reformers meaning that it had done great at implementing this policy and in fact egypt gross domestic product did grow an average of about seven percent those years it was only one little problem that when that happens the gap between the rich and the poor also grew because growth doesn't say anything about this tradition right so the economy grew the world bank and i m f were thrilled everything looked cool except no one was really paying close attention to the fact that according the world bank's own figures in two thousand and seven forty four percent of the  lived on slightly more than the poverty line of two dollars a day or less so and that number has grown since two thousand and seven there was also a huge spike in the price of food in tw an accidental reason the drought in russia russia stopped exporting when russia is a big wheat export or so the price of wheat and bread rose all around the world this was somewhere in the background i mean of course us mubarak was a brutal dictator in the police were torturing people and the same is true zain of the lobbying then ali in tunisia but when people are barely making ends meet and having a hard time finding enough food that they can afford to eat so you can expect this kind of instability even john kerry is never going to be telling us about this that's right so in other words it's not just the western industrial countries that have a problem with the one percent we kno that's far more exacerbated in the globe so far more exact although the united states is actually coming to look like a third world country in terms of our levels of poverty and the gap between the rich and the the poor ever growing inequality  i do want to get to talk to more about egypt and about israel because those are your particular areas of expertise but before we leave syria i want to go back to the question of hezbollah's direct  engagement now within syria attacking other modes on the space equate this is not what the basis of the foundational basis of hezbollah was all about was to confront israel what immediate effect is that having the perception of that has essentially defeated israel in southern lebanon and was seen as a heroic organization as a result so immediate reaction to this not turning a lot of secular my fists in particular in lebanon but i think more broadly who previously were shall we say tolerant of hezbollah as part of the anti imperialist and the zionist front and now decided oh no they got in bed with our side that's too much and they're breaking their relations and adopting a much more critical attitude which i think is a good thing i mean when i was in lebanon i was actually in lebanon twice in the last three months but previous to that i had been there in two thousand and six just before the war with israel chomsky happened to be there at the same time and he was invited on to the hezbollah t v station and many people were saying what are you doing there i mean that's not what you should be doing but this was arranged by again secular leftists to thought of hezbollah as well we don't like them of course we don't agree with their whole ideological framework but they're on the right side when it comes to american imperialism and  really lined up actively with us i mean i have been supporting our side for a beginning but sending fighters and so on they could reasonably claim that they are a legitimate force in lebanese conducting a war every systems against israel there is this argument over a tiny little bit of land the shebaa farms which the lebanese and the syrians say belongs to lebanon the israelis and the un say it belongs to syria and more broadly you know israel and all the time overflying lebannon and breaking the sound barrier and intimidating people and so forth so ok their loved one means army exists but it has no real operational capacity so they are we will acknowledge that you do that well but now that us something they can easily claim anymore and now they are throwing their weight behind our force outside of lebanon which is destabilizing lebanon which is damaging lebanese national unity which in the very best of cases is extremely fragile they are lining up with iran  iran has been targeted by israel in the united states people in modern on might not like the idea that israel or the united states will track iran but they don't want to be any part of that either thank you very much they don't see why lebanon and has anything to gain by identifying with iran in that situation hezbollah has something to gain because syria is critical to his blood as the transfer point for the weapons that iran sends to hizbollah so you can understand narrowly to my way of thinking even in their own terms it's not a very clever decision but you can understand narrowly why they may be doing what they're doing but i think this is in the long run likely to undermin attractiveness that they have had far beyond lebanon i mean when i was in egypt right after being in lebanon in two thousand and six after the war there were pictures of her son as an arab hero all over pa anticipate seeing more of that was do you think they really were just going after missiles as israel going to get more militarily involved some way around the edges saying that they're stopping you know would be even more stupid than for the united states to be militarily involved because one of the i mean it's think claims is that the israelis are stirring up these terrorists to undermine the regime because the regime is the one arab regime that confronts israel so if you were israel you would know want to be doing too many things that would give credence to the regimes claims now so i am inclined to believe that yes those were actual arms shipments and that israel would like very much to sit back and stay out but somebody up in the israeli military intelligence command said no that too so israel has surprisingly been somewhat restrained in lebanon now if you look at israel syria situation there has been no fighting on that border since one nine hundred seventy four at all yeah let's turn to egypt where you've spent a lot of time you've lived there you've taught there i want to start this off by recalling a presentation that i went to shortly after the t over at stanford university i think it was larry diamond to put this on and there were middle east scholars from all around the country around the world actually there kind of analyzing what had just happened then as i recall the evolution of this discussion among all of you the topic went from being was it a successful revolution to well was it even a revolution and the main answer was it's way too early to tell and maybe we should break for lunch  upsurge there was more than a demand for reform if you look at the slogans in not only to where square but the other major urban squares were occupied in the same eighteen days before mubarak fell but even more important look at how people behaved women were there they were not harassed they were much more public and participating than role leadership then just present than will muslims and christians protected each other when they were praying people were raising slogans about  ad freedom social justice social justice ards pre con a vague what it means but some acknowledgment of the fact that the economic situation has led to very sharp disparities between the rich and the poor people we're talking about torture and in the original impetus for the demonstration was to protest police torture which is ubiquitous and which remains ubiquitous in egypt which is the lead in to say that no i don't think there has been a revolution yet but it's also not over the main pillars of the mubarak regime remain more or less in place as they were the army the army made a deal with the muslim brothers over the constitution which was adopted by referendum in december of last year in which basically the army gets to control its own fear with no civilian oversight whatsoever pretty much as it was under mubarak the ministry of interior and the police have not to any significant degree been purified or reformed they remain as they are the judicia at the top there are judges appointed by mubarak who have become the heroes kind of strange that those judges should be cut because they are trying to restrain the muslim brothers but throughout the judicia ry there have been no substantial changes the muslim brothers as it turns out are not very competent even at administering the state which that was a surprise to me and many other people because their social base are engineers doctors lawyers pharmacists people with university education in the professions that's their that's their main strength and the irony of appeal is that they've been delivering the social services in lieu of the government and so they took over the engineers syndicate and the doctor syndicate and they did indeed run those institutions very well and use them than want to provide services for their members but also for poor people that it turns out you know when it comes to running a government they don't have a clue and basically what they've done is they've made deals with the remnants of the mubarak era people in the different institutions so the trade unions which is particular object of my interest because i do a lot of labor history is basically split between holdovers from the people who run the trade union federation the still the only legal trade union federation in egypt although there are actually two others those who are the mubarak people and the muslim brothers people follow the minister of labor is now a muslim brother and the head of the federation is someone from the old regime the president appointed guy who's the head of the federation to be a member of the upper house of parliament the shura council so there's exactly one trade unionist in the shura council which at this point has full legislative authority because the lower house of parliament which should have it was dissolved because the constitutional court declared it illegally elected now there were supposed to be new kinds of new parliamentary elections in september but the constitutional court has now twice declared proposed electoral laws that the muslim brothers have suggested to also be unconstitutional basically they're trying to rig the election without reading the election that is to say to legali rigging yeah gerrymandering and making the laws so that they're not going to get forty seven percent fair and square which is what they got last time they might get thirty percent and if they are not great folk to be rallying around but they're saying no you can't do that interesting so at the time all this was going on be and even before mubarak was toppled i think  you were one of a few people trying to point out that actually this unrest hadn't started in to restore square it started with some substantial labor actions in that activities and as you mentioned briefly th this is really been one of your areas of special study is the labor movement the workers in egypt is there anything similar that going on absolutely you talked about the up you know the upper echelons have pretty much the same structures but that was true before mubarak but it was the real on the street labor unions that were getting some scuffed up at the grassroots the fact that the official state fell there was a steadily increasing number of strikes so that according to the most let's say exaggerated number at one point there got to be seven hundred strikes in demonstrations and other forms of workers collective action a year in two thousand and nine in twenty eleven the year that mubarak fell in february alone the month in which he fell there were four hundred seventy nine strikes one thousand nine hundred sixty nine strikes sit ins labor protests in two thousand and twelve so this is continuing astronomically escalating and that reason is that the problems are not resolved that movement began largely as a result of the sell off of the public sector and the movement accelerated when the sell off of the public sector accelerated beginning as i mentioned with installation of the new government in july two thousand and four  so people are worried about being fired being paid less being given fewer social benefits although egypt jamal requires that foreign or even a local egyptian private investor who buys a public enterprise has to maintain the status of the workers exactly as it was their wages can't be cut their benefits can't because their pensions can't be cut and so on but this is happening right in the last second even if they are getting what they used to be paid so let's say are really really good wage for a textile worker would be something like six hundred egypt pounds a month that's one hundred dollars i mean that's part of the average egyptian family of five so let's even say that you have two incomes and you have two hundred dollars a month for a family of five that is just not ok it doesn't work people have to pay for tutoring for their kids because teachers don't teach in schools because the schools are overcrowded and the teachers aren't getting enough money to make it worth while for them to teach so after school there will actually teach your child what they should have taught them in school but you have to pay extra so every family of course once their kids to do well in school and they sacrifice but that costs a lot of money to do that across twenty five different towns an hour to pay for the tutor so the price of food  been skyrocketing we american ambassador to egypt i mean talk about being stupid here's a speech to the rotary club and says egypt needs to raise the price of fuel a week later they raise the price of fuel  any significant lessons from mistakes that the united states has been making in the middle east at least as far back as one nine hundred fifty three one who overthrew the democratically elected government of iran so  anomalous to want to learn that means truly do have to want to learn and we do not appear to want to learn or at least not our government anyway my students want to learn actually even even one one of them is in our o t c and she wanted to know was she wants to know what they're going to do to her so the economic crisis in egypt continues the muslim brothers have no solution to it whatsoever because if anything they're even more free market fundamentalists than the people when there was an american delegation of about one hundred business people who went to egypt last spring and they met with the muslim brothers and they came back to the united states is we can do business with these there's two sense in egypt at this point because the country is not stable now very quickly because i want to get to our studio audience and folks watching at home and online very briefly before we went on air i mentioned we do want to get a political update from israel which is one of the things you talk about is israel palestine conflict you teach about but nothing seems to be happening on that front unless how having power makes you stupid because we've already been there before right congolese and rice tried in the last year of the second term of george w bush to do the same thing and it became very clear that even though the palestinians at the time as we know from the release of the palestine papers it was published on al jazeera even though the palestinians at the time were willing to make more concessions  any palestinian leadership ever had before that was not enough for a good almer who to his credit it can be said he's now said publicly either we make a deal with the palestinians and there's going to be two states or we're going to have an apartheid state and eventually one state so that that is where the situation is heading i mean i would say there is hardly any possibility that there will actually be two real states created so if you're the united states and you saw you know congolese or rice also not a stupid person that's not her problem try to get this done and it can be done because the gap between what the israelis are willing to give and what the palestinians are willing to accept is too broad so here comes john kerry's trying to do this exact same trick and the obama administration is even more slavish towards israel than the george w bush administration i mean there has not i mean it seems like there is this the generation first we thought no american administration was more friendly to israel than the clinton administration then we thought no american ministration was more friendly to israel than the george w bush administration and now  there can be no and he said it twice there can be no daylight between the united states and israel well ok well then that we're not hand in peace or any anything there we're having a charade let's go to the audience if you're watching at home you can call in on it five six fourteen ninety one if you're watching online it's area code six five zero and that should all be on your screen if you're here in the studio please wait for a crystal to get to you with a microphone just hold up your hand and there's one up front here and if you would please stand up to make it easier on our camera people so that folks at all and please be sure to hold the microphone right up to your mouth thank you very good  and at stanford workshop about a month ago on minority rights in the arab world you gave us fascinating and i thought very insightful talk about jews in egypt you said you could not get that talk in egypt you said that anything about jews is super politicized in egypt that there is slippage between jews and zionism exists even among the most well educated egyptians so the question is raised as to why what does it come from and how could it be understood don't you think there needs to be a an academic study of what i might call i don't know how you would call it an islamic you hatred that exists or that infests the egyptian mind and maybe other communities in the arab world now i think that's exactly the wrong way to think about it so thank you for quoting me reasonably accurately but i prefer that but you didn't understand the import of what i was saying and to be fair the situation wasn't the most conducive to that either first of all the notion that there is is slamming jew hatred  which is in some way comparable to christian jew hatred is wrong in pre modern christian europe the main attitude of christians towards jews was they killed our lord islam does not have that problem with jews the that is not to say that there were never frictions between muslims and jews when they lived together in the same society there were but on balance the lives of jewish communities in the muslim world were far far better than they were in the muslim world are the nasty anti jewish quotes in the koran yes there are and there are nasty anti jewish girl quotes in the new testament so saying that oh well they say that they're so therefore lit up no that's not how life works people don't live out what is written in religious texts because there are lots of ugly antigonus things in the talmud too and then we would say oh all jews a going no this is not a way to understand anything so what we can see actually is that two things happened to jews in the modern middle east or north africa thing one is that the colonial powers and especially the french tried to latch on to the jews and make them their agents so for example in eight hundred seventy france and invaded algeria nine hundred thirty nine hundred seventy eight france made all the jews of northern algeria not the ones who lived in the far south but that's only a few thousand french citizens so all of a sudden jews who had lived in algeria and who had lived cheek by jowl with muslims no significant social difference between them for hundreds of years they fled to algeria after they were expelled from catholic spain  forty ninety two and you know there were french and because there's always minority majority frictions but nothing like the spanish inquisition for example said so but all of a sudden oh now the jews are the french colonial ist so now is not so good for jews and a lot of jews didn't even ask for that there's a good movie called the list which i highly recommend about algerian popular music in which the jews actually said no we haven't wanted that we thought we were like our muslim neighbors the other thing that happened of course is  the arab israeli conflict so you can see that from the late nineteenth thirty's basically from the palestinian revolt from one hundred thirty six in one thousand carry on but then especially post nine hundred forty eight the conflict between jews and palestinian arabs will over into other places in the arab and muslim world and places like morocco where relations were exceptionally good for hundreds of years because the jews were directly under the protection of the  king all of a sudden there was an anti semitic incident in morocco which even then the independence party came down and condemned that and so on but ok there was an anti semitic incident there were there was a demonstration in cairo which jews were targeted but also christians and other foreigners and then the muslim brothers by the jewish owned businesses in egypt and look at their muslim brothers young egypt  yes they were organizations with a strong element of anti semitism if you go over to iraq you can find a couple of war going is asians over there too so it's not i'm not trying to whitewash and say no there there was no anti semitism in the arab who was actually a nazi collaborator and that goes a long way to explaining why the palestinian arab cause had no credibility in the west after world war two so my embrace i mean i've written a book about this so it's something i know and care a lot about the way to understand this is not there is something wrong with muslims the way to understand this is concretely what happened where did specific incidents come from how did they emerge in a particular historical context what changed to exacerbate relations between jews and their muslim neighbors and their christian neighbors for that matter too i mean it's not that muslims hate christian arabs love them no that's not in the not at all the case and this is an arab jewish thing which has to do with politics not with religion in short all right in short ok here in the back ro issues the standard of living it's at least my they say three times but their income it can be that is between five to ten times higher but you know what living in is that it's also hard so let me suggest that when we talk about the middle east  one should never say definitely never if that's just not going to help us understand things the second part of what you said is true and part of what you said is not true and the part that is true needs to be  dissected a little bit too so first of all it's not true that the standard of living in the west bank is going up it's going down dramatically no ifs ands or buts there are a few places in ramallah and around janine in the northern west bank where largely due to foreign aid people have been given jobs but on the whole high levels of unemployment increasing levels of poverty and decreasing gross domestic product growth but the negative gross domestic the mastic product growth per growth per year i think she specifically mentioned israeli palestinian and israeli palestinians there are two things happening at once on the one hand those who managed to get an education are increasingly moving into certain professional sectors medicine pharmacy law not engineering not high tech because most of those jobs have some defense component and palestinian israelis are hired for those positions with some exceptions i have a friend who's running a nonprofit in nazareth who's trying to actually deal with that question on the other hand by all social indicators health education longevity the palestinians are at the bottom of the social scale in israel so you have in israel what has been happening actually in most of the global south but also in the united states increasing gap between the rich and the poor israel is the second or third most unequal country among the organization for economic  economic cooperation and development countries these are the most developed capitalist economies so on the one hand if you are upper middle class or in the israeli elite and that does include a few hours you're doing fine the vast majority of israelis are not doing fine israel has i'm very high level of poverty and the poverty is concentrated on the one hand in the palestinian israeli sector and in the other hand in the ultra orthodox sector ok we have a caller on the line who is the director of the middle east for the international crisis center was on international crisis group was on terry gross today and said that the situation in syria has flipped from being a syrian struggle with regional ramifications to a regional struggle focused in syria now the the sense in which that is correct and what he was meaning is that the saudis and the qataris for slightly different reasons are supporting the opposition to syria and so basically the united states policy has been trying to split the region and why fundamentally because the united states has never accepted that there's been a revolution in iran so the united states policy has been trying to split the region into the good stable so in these autocratic as they may be and there was no country in the middle east more autocratic in saudi arabia so the saudi arabia they are cool they're cool jordan's absolute monarchy but they are cool hos organization amasses a sunni organization but they get thrown into the mix because iran sometimes sends them money and weapons except the hamas unlike hizbollah has said no we don't support the assad regime so  extricated themselves from that problem so there there is a certain shia alignment and we could add to that although the united states is not happy about this at all the government of iraq iran essentially won the iraq war because the people who came to power were the people who had been protected in iran after they escaped the massacre that saddam hussein unleashed on the shia in the south after they rebelled when george h w bush called on them to rebel and then didn't help them so they fled to iran and came back after two thousand and three so the shia elements in the region who also happen to sit on a lot of the oil iran iraq major oil producers and most of the oil in saudi arabia happens to be living under the ten percent of the population which is shia bahrain is also majority shia we allowed the saudis to march in there and crush brutally the arab spring a popular uprising which was totally an armed there that's going on as we speak when i was in lebanon i met a young woman from bahrain very very brave and very very bold who's running the bomb rain geo in london because her husband was arrested and spent ten months in jail and they fled the country so this is the way that the united states and israel have tried to line up the region and the saudis and catteries and the turks are ok with that which then results in them mucking around in syria to support their particular elements of the opposition so the car theories are more supporting the muslim brothers the saudis are more supporting the new store front not because the saudis love this as you know much more opportunistic elements than that and they're all jockeying for influence hoping that the us our government falls  and they may be overplaying their hand because you as a government may not for well have a couple of minutes left even less than a couple of minutes maybe you can quickly summarize what was the reaction in the region and i know this is hard to do generally but to obama's wanted national security pivot away from announcing the end of the war on terror or was that i don't think there was much of an impact at all because obama made a very strong positive impression on the region when he went to cairo and gave the speech he then followed that up with less than zero so people