Obama bids for dialogue with Muslim world
“The United States and Saudi Arabia have a long history of friendship. We have a strategic relationship,” Obama said yesterday as he visited the monarch’s desert horse farm. He called Abdullah wise and gracious, adding: “I am confident that working together that the United States and Saudi Arabia can make progress on a whole host of issues of mutual interest.”
Abdullah expressed his “best wishes to the friendly American people who are represented by a distinguished man who deserves to be in this position.”
Earlier, the king greeted Obama at Riyadh’s main airport. Obama and Abdullah sat together in gilded chairs, sipped cardamom-flavoured Arabic coffee and chatted briefly before retreating for private talks.
Around the same time, Al-Jazeera television broadcast a new audio tape from Osama bin Laden in which he threatened Americans and said Obama inflamed hatred toward the US by ordering Pakistan to crack down on Islamic militants.
Saudi Arabia is a stopover en route to Cairo, where Obama is to deliver a speech he’s been promising since last year’s election campaign – aiming to set a new tone in the US’s often-strained dealings with the world’s 1.5 billion Muslims.
With Abdullah alongside, Obama said: “I thought it was very important to come to the place where Islam began and to seek his majesty’s counsel and to discuss with him many of the issues that we confront here in the Middle East.”
In a pre-trip interview with the BBC, Obama set the tone for his visit to the Middle East, saying: “What we want to do is open a dialogue. You know, there are misapprehensions about the West, on the part of the Muslim world. And, obviously, there are some big misapprehensions about the Muslim world when it comes to those of us in the West,” Obama said.
Aides cautioned that Obama was not out to break new policy ground in his Cairo speech.
“We don’t expect that everything will change after one speech,” spokesman Robert Gibbs said. “I think it will take a sustained effort and that’s what the president is in for.”
Officials said Obama also wouldn’t flinch from difficult topics, whether it’s the Iraq and Afghanistan conflicts, the goal of a Palestinian state or democracy and human rights. Obama has been criticised for setting the address in Egypt, where President Hosni Mubarak has jailed dissidents and clung to power for nearly three decades.
In Riyadh, he talked to Abdullah about a host of problems, from Arab-Israeli peace efforts to Iran’s nuclear program. The Saudis have voiced growing concern in private that an Iranian bomb could unleash a nuclear arms race in the region.
The surge in oil prices also was on the agenda. Crude topped $68 a barrel this week, sparking fears that a fresh jump in energy costs could snuff out early sparks of a recovery from a deep global slump.
The president was to stay overnight at the king’s farm outside Riyadh. Abdullah keeps 260 Arabian horses on its sprawling grounds in air-conditioned comfort.
In any effort to court Muslims, Saudi Arabia will be key – not just for their oil wealth, but by virtue of the authority they wield at the centre of Arab history and culture.
