A day before Obama delivered his speech in Cairo, a tape attributed to Osama bin Laden, asking his followers not to trust the US, was aired on Al Jazeera. ROD NORDLAND listens in

Barack Obama’s speech in Cairo last Thursday was “soft spoken and eloquent,” said Moqtada al-Sadr, the radical Iraqi cleric, grudgingly, since he also said he despised it. It was a speech that meant different things to different people, a quality much noted in this US president. He supported Israel, but reached out to the Muslim world in an unprecedented way. Some friends were troubled, others reassured. Some of America’s enemies denounced it, but none dismissed it. Not even the arch-enemies at whom, in some important way, the speech was directed.

Just the day before, in fact, a pre-emptive audio tape attributed to Osama bin Laden warned his followers not to trust whatever Obama would say. And as it turned out, his fear was justified. To some, the president’s speech was above all else about the war on terror, a direct attack on bin Laden and the mindset he promulgates.

“Barack Obama is not just trying to reach out to Muslims for the sake of it,” says Fawaz Gerges, a professor of Middle Eastern studies at Sarah Lawrence College and an authority on modern jihad. “He’s trying to hammer a deadly nail in Osama bin Laden’s message.” What President Obama understood, Gerges says, is that it is not a war that can be won militarily, but only ideologically.

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