Bush Left America's Standing in the Mideast at Rock Bottom -- Can Obama Turn It Around in Cairo?

WASHINGTON, In his most widely anticipated speech to date, U.S. President Barack Obama will reach out directly to the Muslim world Thursday morning at Cairo University.

The address will set out an approach – likely broad, but at times with specific concrete goals – designed to ease the concerns of many of the globe’s 1.4 billion Muslims, many of whom view the U.S. and its foreign policy negatively. But his attempt is fraught with stumbling blocks.

On Monday, Obama told the French television channel ‘Canal Plus’ that he intends to "create a better dialogue" by "provid[ing] a framework, a speech of how I think we can remake relations between the United States and countries in the Muslim world."

In the interview he also spoke of a knowledge deficit about Islam in the U.S. and the West, and said that "we have to educate ourselves more effectively on Islam."

Obama intends to distance himself from the policies of his predecessor, the wildly unpopular George W. Bush, and present a new image to the Muslim and Arab worlds.

Speaking to the BBC on Monday, however, Obama flatly denied that his speech would be an apology for U.S. policies of the past, including the two wars in Iraq and Afghanistan – the latter which Obama is significantly escalating – and U.S. detention and interrogation policies in those countries as well as the military’s Guantanamo Bay facility.

Obama, born to a Muslim father, is expected to lay out U.S positions that would put a more friendly face on the U.S.-led "war on terror," which was perceived by many Muslims as an assault on their faith.

He also is expected to reiterate recent calls for a two-state solution to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, and discuss some concrete measures for accomplishing it.

But already, the choice to deliver the speech in Egypt, the largest Arab country and an undemocratic U.S. ally, has brought some controversy.

Confronted by the BBC, Obama refused to call Egyptian dictator Hosni Mubarak an "authoritarian", saying he rejects such labels, but acknowledged "criticisms of the manner in which politics operates in Egypt".

Egyptians, for their part, are sceptical of the U.S. change of course under Obama, but his ratings are considerably better than Bush, according to a survey of Egyptians by WorldPublicOpinion.org, a website of the University of Maryland’s Programme on International Policy Attitudes (PIPA).

Thirty-nine percent of Egyptians have faith that Obama will make sound decisions about U.S. foreign policy, and 46 percent view the U.S. favourably, compared with 27 percent under Bush.

But Obama faces even more daunting polling numbers on other questions. Sixty-seven percent of Egyptians think the U.S. has a negative impact on the globe and three-quarters think the U.S. is trying to weaken and divide the Muslim world. Four of five Egyptians think the U.S. is out to dominate Middle Eastern oil, and the same number think the U.S. is trying to impose its culture on Muslim countries.

PIPA notes that these views are largely unchanged from polling in 2008 and that Obama is seen as harbouring the same goals as the U.S. in general.

With Egypt’s oppressive politics and human rights violations and its standing as a close U.S. ally, many Egyptians see the U.S. as unsupportive of democracy. Four in 10 respondents thought that the U.S. does not support democracy in the Muslim world.

"We are... alarmed by signals that the Obama’s administration’s support for democracy may have waned," wrote Egyptian dissident Ayman Nour in the New York Times on Wednesday, noting that democracy funding for Egypt had gone down.

"We don’t expect Mr. Obama to bring progress to Egypt," he wrote. "But we expect him to demand freedom for all and to restate his conviction that oppressive regimes march on the wrong side of history."