"However eloquently delivered, the address will not be able to overcome or compensate for Obama’s profound lack of a strategic vision..."

"... The President and his senior advisers are determined to depict what is happening in the Middle East today as a popular repudiation of both Usama Bin Ladin and the Islamic Republic of Iran.  Besides overlooking the profound antagonism between Al-Qa’ida and the Islamic Republic, this approach is fundamentally at odds with on-the-ground reality in the region, and is, therefore, likely to fall flat as a rhetorical strategy. 

We have pointed out before, and it remains true, that those Middle Eastern regimes that have been overthrown or are at serious risk of being overthrown (at least without Saudi military intervention) have been challenged not because they were sympathetic to either bin Ladin (none were) or Iran.  They have been challenged because their own people saw them as not only corrupt and unresponsive, but as bought-and-paid-for vessels for U.S. policies requiring them to compromise their nations’ sovereignty and independence and to act against the interests and preferences of their peoples.

Furthermore, Obama and his administration are heading down the same dead-end road as their recent predecessors in focusing on U.S.-sponsored economic development as the solution to many of the region’s most pressing problems.  This tactic has been deployed for years to assuage Palestinian despair over life under open-ended, U.S.-facilitated occupation and “explain away” the fundamentally political roots of anti-Israeli and anti-U.S. violence in the region.  It has not worked in the past; it will not work now... (Continue, here)"