May 7, 2011

Osama Bin Laden is dead. Al-Qaeda is in disfavor in most corners of the civilized world. “The democracy movement,” fashioned on the tenets of the U.S. Constitution and Declaration of Independence, is ascendant across the Middle East.

Perhaps historians will look back some day and say that it was not only the actions of a heroic few in Tunisia and Egypt and elsewhere, not only the technological advances brought about by new online social media platforms, but, in some pivotal way, President Barak Obama’s speech in Cairo in 2009 that helped shift the balance of Arab public opinion so that at some very fundamental level America started being perceived as a force supporting citizenry over despotism, security over terror, justice over injustice.

But maybe I’m dreaming.