Obama to Address Arab Spring In Major Speech

In a major speech next week, President Barack Obama will outline the Administration’s vision for the region in light of dramatic shifts currently underway in the Middle East and North Africa and the death of al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden. The New York Times states that “Administration officials said the president was eager to use Bin Laden’s death as a way to articulate a unified theory about the popular uprisings from Tunisia to Bahrain — movements that have common threads but also disparate features, and have often drawn sharply different responses from the United States.”  However, some  Middle East analysts, such as Jon Alterman, caution that Obama’s speech may not make an impact on his target audience given the lack  of follow-up on U.S. rhetoric in the past: “One of the differences between now and the Cairo speech is it’s not clear a priori that what the U.S. president has to say matters [so much] to these audiences.”  Obama’s speech will also follow the visit of Jordan’s King Abdullah and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to Washington DC next week.