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Robert Satloff argues that President Obama's message to the Arab and Muslim world must go beyond "anti-Bushism" to have the effect he desires.
When President Obama speaks to the world's Muslims from Cairo this week, he'll touch, again, on the themes of respect and engagement. But he's delivered that message at least three times already, and this time his audience will expect more. They'll want to know whether Obama has a "big idea" about U.S policy toward Arabs and Muslims.
For all his faults, President George W. Bush did have a big idea -- that a witch's brew of radical Islamist extremism and repressive autocracy was destroying Muslim societies, and that the antidote was democracy. Bush not only believed it, he translated this idea into real policies, such as promoting a democratic, Shiite-led government in Iraq and endorsing flawed elections in Egypt, Lebanon and the Palestinian Authority. Some of his initiatives worked well and some were disastrous, but they all flowed from Bush's grand view of the situation.
