The U.S. Committed to the Kingdom. But What Can It Do If There is a Game of Thrones?

In the "newspaper of record" this past Friday and yesterday there were big stories on the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. Part of the "Secrets of the Kingdom" irregular series in The New York Times.

"Saudi Arabia, Where Even Milk Depends on Oil, Struggles to Remake Its Economy," by Nicholas Kulish (Friday), and the even longer "Rise of Saudi Prince Shatters Decades of Royal Tradition," by Mark Mazzetti and Ben Hubbard (Sunday), paint a picture of woe for the absolute monarchy of 30 million subjects.

Kulish captures this woe in a few paragraphs (and without even mentioning the war in Yemen):

Saudi Arabia’s about-face last month at a meeting of the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries in Algeria, agreeing to cut production to raise the price of crude, showed the urgency policy makers here are feeling. Prince Mohammed announced plans this year to sell off a small piece of the country’s economic crown jewel, Saudi Aramco, to free up money for investment.

The budget deficit was nearly $100 billion last year. The country’s foreign reserves have dropped by a quarter since oil prices started falling in 2014. The government has taken loans from foreign banks and will try to borrow more from the global bond market.

Hedge funds are wagering that the Saudi central bank will be forced to revalue its currency, the riyal. Zach Schreiber, the head of PointState Capital, which made $1 billion betting that oil would fall, told investors in May that the Saudi riyal was “massively overvalued” and that the country had only “two to three years of runway before it hits a wall.”

The government has abruptly cut construction projects, forcing contractors to lay off workers. This year, foreign laborers set fire to buses in protests demanding months of back pay. The sudden jump in water bills this spring led to such an outcry on social media that the minister for water and electricity was fired after telling customers to dig their own wells if they were unhappy with prices.

“If you’re a Saudi, you’ve grown up with that expectation of the financial largess that’s dished out,” said Adel Hamaizia, the vice chairman of the Oxford Gulf and Arabian Peninsula Studies Forum. “Things are likely to get more difficult for the government in terms of managing frustration from the everyday people.”

Adding to the pressure, the kingdom’s population has nearly doubled since 1990. With half of all Saudis younger than 25, the private sector does not offer enough good opportunities for the estimated 300,000 young people entering the work force each year, especially women. Fewer of the public sinecures that have sustained earlier generations are available, with plans for deeper cuts.

The Mazzetti and Hubbard story describes the coming battle for ascension to the throne between boy Prince bin Salman and Crown Prince bin Nayef. Prince Salman's father, King Salman, is fast on his way to dementia and has already ceded much of the management of the Kingdom to his favorite son. Vision 2030, the neoliberal reboot of the House of Saud, is Prince bin Salman's baby.

All of this is an enormous problem for the United States. The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia is a U.S. creation. The USG will do everything in its power to insure its survival (such as a presidential veto of a universally popular bill to allow families of 9/11 victims to pursue civil claims against al-Saud, as well as knocking out Yemeni radar sites).

The Kingdom is singularly unpopular among U.S. voters. It is going to be a tough pull for any U.S. Government to save the Kingdom's bacon. And what does the U.S. do if there is a civil war among Saudi royals?

From Otpor! and Tamarod to Today

I went to bed last night thinking about Egypt. I arrived there in my mind after reading a piece that appeared on the TomDispatch web site at the beginning of last month. "Three Times When the World Broke Open -- and Two When It Might Again: In Praise of Impractical Movements," by Mark Engler and Paul Engler, is a refutation of gradualism in politics, where change is engineered in piecemeal fashion by consensus of ruling elites, in favor of sudden paradigm shift powered by the ruled masses.

Nothing to argue with there. The problem I had with the essay was one of the three examples of nonviolent change offered as proof of the potency of spontaneous revolt. The Englers applaud the Serbian student group Otpor! for sparking the movement that removed Slobodan Milosevic from power in October 2000 (what is commonly classed as a color revolution though it is named after a bulldozer), something that the military might of NATO was unable to achieve the prior year. But it is well established that Otpor! received substantial assistance from the U.S. government, including training in nonviolent resistance.

This brought to mind Tamarod, the youth-led Egyptian protest movement that purportedly collected 22 million signatures calling for early presidential elections and sparked the June 2013 mass demonstrations that prefigured the July 3rd coup. It turns out Tamarod was part of the military takeover all along.

Two stories this morning provide insight into the rough shape of "astroturf" popular uprisings a few years on. The first, "Egypt Gives Saudi Arabia 2 Islands in a Show of Gratitude," by Declan Walsh, describes how the el-Sisi government has signed over two islands at the mouth of the Gulf of Aqaba in exchange for agreements with the Saudis worth billions. The second, "Arseniy Yatsenyuk, Ukraine’s Premier, Quits Amid Splits in Post-Revolution Alliance," by Andrew Kramer, explains how the U.S. has finally eaten its Maidan prodigy, "Yats," forcing him out in favor of the "chocolate king" Poroshenko.

Re-branding coups as popular revolts does not a revolution make. These ersatz rebellions are a ruse to maintain the old, exploitative privileges which motivate the popular uprisings to begin with. It is not a sustainable model for social transformation, to say the least.

The Saudi Price for Supporting the Iranian Nuclear Deal: The Election of Marine Le Pen and the End of the EU?

It is clear to me from reading the extensive coverage of what is being labeled Europe's refugee crisis that any period of "feel good" magnanimity and open-hearted welcome is going to be very short lived. The political response is going to be the election of right-wing parties; it is almost a certainty. The future of the European Union does not look bright.

It is always important to remember that this current crisis is just the latest of many resulting from the war on Syria. Whether the chemical-weapons attack in the Damascus suburb of two-years back, or the skyrocketing rise of ISIS shortly thereafter, the U.S.-GCC-Turkey regime-change operation directed against the Syrian Arab Republican has been a constant source of murder, mayhem and global instability. One could make the argument that the New Cold War triggered by the ham-handed U.S.-backed coup in Kiev at the end of February 2014 was payback for Russia's steadfast support of Assad's Syria.

At the end of last week a story written by stalwart USG mouthpieces Michael Gordon and Eric Schmitt appeared. Based on information provided by unnamed "American officials," "Russian Moves in Syria Pose Concerns for U.S." alleged a new Russian military buildup:

WASHINGTON — Russia has sent a military advance team to Syria and is taking other steps the United States fears may signal that President Vladimir V. Putin is planning to vastly expand his military support for President Bashar al-Assad of Syria, administration officials said Friday. 

The Russian moves, including the recent transport of prefabricated housing units for hundreds of people to a Syrian airfield and the delivery of a portable air traffic control station there, are another complicating factor in Secretary of State John Kerry’s repeated efforts to enlist Mr. Putin’s support for a diplomatic solution to the bloody conflict in Syria. 

The Russians have also filed military overflight requests with neighboring countries through September.

American officials acknowledge that they are not certain of Russia’s intentions, but some say the temporary housing suggests that Russia could deploy as many as 1,000 advisers or other military personnel to the airfield near the Assad family’s ancestral home. The airfield serves Latakia, Syria’s principal port city.

Other American officials say they see no indication that Russia intends to deploy significant numbers of ground forces, but they say the housing would enable Russia to use the airfield as a major hub for ferrying in military supplies for the Syrian government, or possibly as a launching pad for Russian airstrikes in support of Mr. Assad’s forces.

American intelligence analysts are also looking at ship loadings in Russia to determine what might be bound for Syria, and one official speculated that the Russian deployment might eventually grow to 2,000 to 3,000 personnel.

“There are some worrisome movements — logistical, preparatory types of things,” said an administration official, who added that there was no confirmation that large numbers of Russian soldiers, aircraft or heavy weapons had yet arrived. Officials asked for anonymity because they were discussing classified intelligence reports.

This story paved the way for a reproving phone call from Secretary of State John Kerry to his Russian counterpart Sergey Lavrov (Michael Gordon, "U.S. Warns Russia Over Military Support for Assad").

It is helpful to recall that King Salman of Saudi Arabia was visiting the White House at the same time; the Saudi despot gave his blessing to the P5+1 nuclear deal with Iran.

The House of Saud's public acceptance of the Iranian nuclear deal was obviously purchased. What all was promised by Obama remains unknown. One thing though is clear: the story about the Russia's ramped up support for Assad, followed by Kerry's rebuke, was part of the price.

In a delightful story today, "Russia Answers U.S. Criticism Over Military Aid to Syria," by Neil MacFarquhar, Russia fires back. First, MacFarquhar provides a summation:

In Washington, the State Department announced on Saturday that Secretary of State John Kerry had telephoned his Russian counterpart, Sergey V. Lavrov, to warn against expanding Russian military aid to Syria. 

According to American intelligence sources, Russia is bolstering Syria’s air defenses in some key areas and possibly building a camp for Russian military personnel. 

Mr. Kerry warned Mr. Lavrov that such aid would further escalate the conflict, cost more lives, push more refugees to flee and risk a confrontation with other forces fighting the Islamic State, according to the State Department. 

In Greece on Monday, the Foreign Ministry said it was studying a request from the United States to deny Russia the permission it has sought for overflights to Syria, Reuters reported.

Then the wonderful Russian rebuttal:

MOSCOW — The Foreign Ministry here expressed surprise on Monday over an American warning to Russia against escalating the conflict in Syria, saying that the Kremlin’s Syrian policy — in particular furnishing military aid to help the government confront extremist forces — had been consistent for years. 

“We have always supplied equipment to them for their struggle against terrorists,” Maria V. Zakharova, the Foreign Ministry spokeswoman, said in an interview. “We are supporting them, we were supporting them and we will be supporting them” in that fight.

The sharp exchanges over Russian military aid to the Syrian government appeared to have dampened a brief spirit of cooperation, starting in early August, when Russia, the United States and Saudi Arabia agreed on a renewed effort to reach a political solution to the Syria crisis.

Some analysts see any possible Russian move to strengthen military aid now as a maneuver by President Vladimir V. Putin to embarrass the United States. 

“It is basically a chance to play on Obama’s checkerboard,” said Konstantin Von Eggert, an independent political analyst, with Mr. Putin saying: “You want to fight the Islamic State. I am there. I am ready. Ah, sorry, you don’t really want to fight.” [!]

Russia may try to use American criticism of any military aid as proof that the Obama administration is soft on the Islamic State and only wants to topple President Bashar al-Assad, he said, so “it can be presented as an American unwillingness to fight evil.”

Mr. Putin is scheduled to attend the United Nations General Assembly in New York this month, for the first time in 10 years. That will give him a high-profile platform to promise to use Russia’s resources in the fight against international terrorism, including at a Sept. 27 meeting on confronting the Islamic State that the Obama administration is organizing.

***

“The problem is that the West cannot show one example of how they would manage the Syria story right after,” Ms. Zakharova said. “What is the West planning to do right after? Do they have a magic wand that will transform Syria from civil war to economic prosperity?” [That's the unanswerable question, isn't it?]

The main challenge in Syria remains the future of Mr. Assad. Russia is generally dismissive of the argument that Mr. Assad created the current chaos in Syria and fostered the rise of Islamic extremism by having refused to engage with the peaceful opposition when street protests started in 2011. Much of the opposition in exile insists that he should be barred from a role in any political transition. Russia has said such a position amounts to an unacceptable precondition for talks.

Both Russia and Iran have made a show of rejecting claims that their support for Mr. Assad has softened. The Iranians, whose military aid has been vital to the Damascus government, defended Mr. Assad on Monday for the first time in a while. 

“Those who have set a condition about the Syrian president in the past two years should be blamed for the continued war and they should account for the bloodshed,” Mohammad Javad Zarif, Iran’s foreign minister, said at a news conference in Tehran.

With Obama locking down the Iranian nuclear deal in Congress, the Saudis took what they could get; in addition to a $1 billion arms deal, what they could get appears to include an increased commitment to hostilities against Syria. The refugees will continue to stream through Serbia to Hungary, and from there to points northwest. The EU will fray. Marine Le Pen will probably be elected in spring 2017.

A Vindication of the Obvious: Moussaoui Fingers King Salman

Scott Shane has this bombshell posted on the Gray Lady web site within the last hour, "Moussaoui Calls Saudi Princes Patrons of Al Qaeda":

WASHINGTON — In highly unusual testimony inside the federal supermax prison, a former operative for Al Qaeda has described prominent members of Saudi Arabia’s royal family as major donors to the terrorist network in the late 1990s and claimed that he discussed a plan to shoot down Air Force One with a Stinger missile with a staff member at the Saudi Embassy in Washington.

The Qaeda member, Zacarias Moussaoui, has received a diagnosis of mental illness but was found competent to stand trial on terrorism charges. He was sentenced to life in prison in 2006 and is held in the most secure prison in the federal system, in Florence, Colo.

Last year, he wrote to Judge George B. Daniels of United States District Court for the Southern District of New York, who is presiding over a lawsuit filed against Saudi Arabia by relatives of those killed in the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. He said he wanted to testify in the case, and after lengthy negotiations with Justice Department officials and the federal Bureau of Prisons, a team of lawyers was permitted to enter the prison and question him for two days last October.

In a statement Monday night, the Saudi Embassy noted that the national Sept. 11 commission had rejected allegations that the Saudi government or Saudi officials had funded Al Qaeda.

“Moussaoui is a deranged criminal whose own lawyers presented evidence that he was mentally incompetent,” the statement said. “His words have no credibility.”

The allegations from Mr. Moussaoui come at a sensitive time in Saudi-American relations, less than two weeks after the death of the country’s longtime monarch, King Abdullah, and the succession of his brother, King Salman.

There has often been tension between Saudi leaders and the Obama administration since the Arab uprisings of 2011 and the efforts to manage the region’s resulting turmoil. Mr. Moussaoui describes meeting in Saudi Arabia with Salman, then the crown prince, and other Saudi royals while delivering them letters from Osama bin Laden.

There has long been evidence that wealthy Saudis provided support for bin Laden, the son of a Saudi construction magnate, and Al Qaeda before the 2001 attacks. Saudi Arabia had worked closely with the United States to finance Islamic militants fighting the Soviet Army in Afghanistan in the 1980s, and Al Qaeda drew its members from militant fighters.

But the extent and nature of Saudi involvement in Al Qaeda, and whether it extended to the planning and financing of the Sept. 11 attacks, has long been a subject of dispute.

Mr. Moussaoui’s testimony, if judged credible, provides new details of the extent and nature of that support in the pre-9/11 period. In more than 100 pages of testimony, filed in federal court in New York on Monday, he comes across as calm and largely coherent, though the plaintiffs’ lawyers questioning him do not challenge his statements.

“My impression was that he was of completely sound mind — focused and thoughtful,” said Sean P. Carter, a Philadelphia lawyer with Cozen O’Connor who participated in the deposition on behalf of the plaintiffs. He said that the lawyers needed to get a special exemption from the “special administrative measures” that keep many convicted terrorists in federal prisons from communicating with outsiders.

The French-born Mr. Moussaoui was detained weeks before Sept. 11 on immigration charges in Minnesota, so he was incarcerated at the time of the attacks. Earlier in 2001, he had taken flying lessons and was wired $14,000 by a Qaeda cell in Germany, evidence that he might have been preparing to become one of the hijackers.

Prince Turki al-Faisal, formerly a Saudi spy chief, who a former Qaeda operative said was on a list of the group’s donors. Credit: Mandel Ngan/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

He said in the prison deposition that he was directed in 1998 or 1999 by Qaeda leaders in Afghanistan to create a digital database of donors to the group. Among those he said he recalled listing in the database were Prince Turki al-Faisal, then the Saudi intelligence chief; Prince Bandar Bin Sultan, the longtime Saudi ambassador to the United States; Prince al-Waleed bin Talal, a prominent billionaire investor; and many of the country’s leading clerics.

“Sheikh Osama wanted to keep a record who give money,” he said in imperfect English — “who is to be listened to or who contributed to the jihad.”

Mr. Moussaoui said he acted as a courier for Bin Laden, carrying personal messages to prominent Saudi princes and clerics. And he described his training in Qaeda camps in Afghanistan in preparation for various proposed plots.

He helped conduct a trial explosion of a 750-kilogram bomb as a trial run for a planned truck-bomb attack on the American Embassy in London, he said, using the same weapon used in the Qaeda attacks in 1998 on the American Embassies in Kenya and Tanzania. He also studied the possibility of staging attacks with crop-dusting aircraft.

In addition, Mr. Moussaoui said, “We talk about the feasibility of shooting Air Force One.”

Specifically, he said, he had met an official of the Islamic Affairs Department of the Saudi Embassy in Washington when the Saudi official visited Kandahar. “I was supposed to go to Washington and go with him” to “find a location where it may be suitable to launch a Stinger attack and then, after, be able to escape,” he said.

He said he was arrested before being able to carry out the reconnaissance mission.

Mr. Moussaoui’s behavior at his trial in 2006 was sometimes erratic. He tried to fire his own lawyers, who presented evidence that he suffered from serious mental illness. But Judge Leonie M. Brinkema, who presided, declared that she was “fully satisfied that Mr. Moussaoui is completely competent” and called him “an extremely intelligent man.”

“He has actually a better understanding of the legal system than some lawyers I’ve seen in court,” she said.

Mr. Carter, the plaintiffs’ lawyer, said that he and his colleagues hoped to return to the Colorado prison to conduct additional questioning of Mr. Moussaoui and that they had been told by prison officials it would be permitted. “We are confident he has more to say,” Mr. Carter said.

I'm sure Moussaoui will be dismissed as insane. Nonetheless, more loss of credibility for the state when they deny yet again the obvious -- that the Saudis maintain the jihadis -- ISIS, Al Qaeda, you name them -- and we play along so we can keep the warfare state forever up and running.

Watch as bought and sold Senators from both sides of the aisle rush to defend the Kingdom -- first the most corrupt, Bob Menendez; then Bob Corker. Thank goodness for the families of the 9/11 victims and their lawyers. If USG actively moves to suppress this based on national security or some other nonsense, we're looking at a total collapse of public support, what little of it there is left, for federal authority. Then we will be that much closer to Egypt.

Paying Fealty to al-Saud, the Murder of Shaimaa al-Sabbagh and Obama's Al-Azhar Speech Five Years Later

Briefly yesterday a story appeared on the Gray Lady's home page about Obama's visit to kiss the ring of the new king of Saudi Arabia. Written by Michael Gordon and Peter Baker, "Top Officials Join Obama in Brief Visit to Saudi King" describes a large entourage of current and former USG officials arriving in the Kingdom as an act of fealty to the new ruler of the House of Saud:

RIYADH, Saudi Arabia — President Obama met with King Salman of Saudi Arabia on Tuesday, leading a bipartisan delegation of prominent current and former officials to shore up an important relationship and offer condolences for the death of King Abdullah. 

American officials said the meetings were the first official discussions the new monarch has held with a visiting foreign dignitary. 

Air Force One landed on a clear, mild afternoon with a brisk wind snapping the American and Saudi flags to attention. At the Erga Palace, the king and the president sat in gold chairs as their meeting got under way. 

Mr. Obama was in Riyadh for only a few hours, detouring from the return leg of a three-day visit to India. Still, the fact that he made the stop was significant, because he rarely travels overseas to mark the death of a foreign leader; more often, he dispatches the vice president, secretary of state or other dignitaries to represent the United States.

American relations with Saudi Arabia were strained by Mr. Obama’s decision not to mount military strikes in Syria against the government of President Bashar al-Assad over the use of chemical weapons. Saudi Arabia has been a bitter foe of Mr. Assad, who has repressed the Sunni Muslim majority in Syria and who has the backing of Iran, the Saudis’ regional rival.

The Saudis are also uneasy about the Obama administration’s pursuit of a nuclear deal with Iran, fearing that it will do too little to restrain the Iranians from developing nuclear weapons. And they were unhappy with American policy toward the Arab Spring uprisings, especially in Egypt, where they accused the United States of turning its back on a friend, President Hosni Mubarak.

Still, the Obama administration has worked assiduously to try to repair relations with the Saudis. After a pivotal June meeting in Jidda between Secretary of State John Kerry and King Abdullah, Saudi Arabia agreed to join the United States in carrying out airstrikes against Islamic State fighters in Syria and Iraq.

Joining the president for the visit on Tuesday were his Republican opponent from 2008, Senator John McCain of Arizona, and several veterans of Republican administrations, including two former secretaries of state, James A. Baker III and Condoleezza Rice.

Ms. Rice was also one of four former national security advisers in the delegation, which also included Brent Scowcroft, Stephen J. Hadley and Samuel Berger.

Senior figures from the Obama administration who joined the delegation included Mr. Kerry; Susan E. Rice, the current national security adviser and former ambassador to the United Nations; John O. Brennan, the director of the C.I.A.; and Gen. Lloyd J. Austin III, who oversees Middle East operations. Democratic members of Congress also took part, including Senator Mark Warner of Virginia and Representatives Nancy Pelosi and Ami Bera of California and Eliot L. Engel and Joseph Crowley of New York.

What is strange about this story, besides the obvious -- leaders of the United States, the world's beacon of freedom and democracy, kowtowing to an absolute monarchy -- is that it didn't remain for long in its prominent spot on the NYT home page, and this morning it can't even be found online in the "World" section, one has to type "Saudi Arabia" in the search box and sort by "Newest."

Obviously the story is embarrassing and needs to be hidden. The fawning tweets of Kerry and Susan Rice portray a government in thrall to al-Saud, a totalitarian dictatorship that exports the jihad the lickspittle U.S. leadership is ostensibly waging a war against. It is all hogwash.

Note the conclusion to the piece:

Mr. Obama said before flying to Riyadh from India that the United States has an interest in a strong partnership with Saudi Arabia, despite its record of repression, human rights abuses and links to terrorism.

“It is important for us to take into account existing relationships, the existing alignments within a very complicated Middle East, to recognize that we have strategic interests in common with Saudi Arabia, and that even as we work on those common interests — for example, countering terrorist organizations — that we are also encouraging them to move in new directions, not just for our sake but more importantly for their sake,” he said in an interview in New Delhi with Fareed Zakaria of CNN.

Mr. Obama was asked whether he would raise the case of the Saudi blogger who was sentenced to receive 1,000 lashes. He said he would not on this occasion, but that he does regularly raise human rights issues with the Saudi government, just as he does with other countries with undemocratic governments.

“What I’ve found effective is to apply steady, consistent pressure, even as we are getting business done that needs to get done,” Mr. Obama said. “And oftentimes, that makes some of our allies uncomfortable. It makes them frustrated. Sometimes we have to balance our need to speak to them about human rights issues with immediate concerns that we have in terms of countering terrorism or dealing with regional stability.”

One wonders what kind of "steady, consistent pressure" is being applied to Egypt where police gunned down protesters last weekend commemorating the fourth anniversary of the Arab Spring.

Robert Mackey reports today in "Egypt Condemns Western Outrage at Fatal Shooting of Protester" on the growing tumult over the murder of socialist activist Shaimaa al-Sabbagh:

Egypt’s Foreign Ministry expressed dismay on Tuesday that the killing of a female activist in Cairo, which occurred as riot police used force to disperse a peaceful protest, had drawn widespread condemnation from the West.

The death of the activist, Shaimaa al-Sabbagh, on Saturday sparked outrage online in large part because it was so well-documented. Wrenching images of Ms. Sabbagh bleeding in the arms of a colleague who picked her up afterher heart and lungs were pierced by shotgun pellets reverberated on social networks.

While Interior Ministry officials initially denied that the police officers who were filmed firing in her direction had played any part in her death, the state prosecutor opened an investigation a day later, in the face of widespread skepticism and the testimony of numerous witnesses.

The graphic images of Ms. Sabbagh’s last moments evoked comparisons to the fatal 2009 shooting of the Iranian protester Neda Agha-Soltan, who bled to death as two witnesses recorded the scene on their phones. 

That Ms. Sabbagh, 32, was engaged in a peaceful protest, with a handful of marchers carrying flowers to Tahrir Square in memory of those killed there in the Egyptian revolution four years ago, helped make her death a focus of anger at the police in a way that the death of at least 18 civilians in clashes the next day did not.

Where are the State Department tweets reminding the Egyptian government of Abdul-Fattah el-Sisi about the Universal Declaration of Human Rights?

Egypt is propped up by the Saudis. So don't expect any outrage from USG.

I went back to read Obama's ballyhooed Cairo address, the one he delivered in June of 2009, the full flush of his "Hope and Change" popularity, at Al-Azhar University announcing a new day in relations between the West and the Muslim world. It is a conservative speech, and knowing what we know today about Obama, that he has been a great failure as a progressive leader, it reads even more as an apologia for business-as-usual U.S. unipolarity.

Something of course that rings absolutely false today is the part of his speech devoted to democracy:

I know there has been controversy about the promotion of democracy in recent years, and much of this controversy is connected to the war in Iraq. So let me be clear: no system of government can or should be imposed upon one nation by any other. 

That does not lessen my commitment, however, to governments that reflect the will of the people. Each nation gives life to this principle in its own way, grounded in the traditions of its own people. America does not presume to know what is best for everyone, just as we would not presume to pick the outcome of a peaceful election. But I do have an unyielding belief that all people yearn for certain things: the ability to speak your mind and have a say in how you are governed; confidence in the rule of law and the equal administration of justice; government that is transparent and doesn't steal from the people; the freedom to live as you choose. Those are not just American ideas, they are human rights, and that is why we will support them everywhere. 

There is no straight line to realize this promise. But this much is clear: governments that protect these rights are ultimately more stable, successful and secure. Suppressing ideas never succeeds in making them go away. America respects the right of all peaceful and law-abiding voices to be heard around the world, even if we disagree with them. And we will welcome all elected, peaceful governments – provided they govern with respect for all their people. 

As a full partner in the Saudi rollback of the Arab Spring, Obama couldn't make this speech in Cairo today. The blowback will be felt in the U.S. homeland in the form of reduced turnout for Democratic nominee during the next presidential election. There are consequences for such a dramatic about-face. People lose faith. Trust erodes.  Better to stay at home than be gulled into another false message of "Hope and Change."