Obama's "Arab Problem"

By Abdullah Al-Arian, published by Al Jazeera:

Obama's "During the past few months, Barack Obama has come under increasing pressure from his would-be Republican opponents, not for secretly subscribing to the faith of the enemy (Obama Muslim-baiting is so 2010), but for his supposed culpability in the events engulfing the Arab world during the past year.

On September 29, presidential hopeful Michele Bachmann told supporters, "You want to know why we have Arab Spring? Barack Obama has laid the table for the Arab Spring by demonstrating weakness from the United States of America."

Just last week, another Republican presidential candidate, Newt Gingrich, pronounced the Arab Spring to be the result of the Obama foreign policy's "grotesque failure". Gingrich went so far as to call it an "anti-Christian spring", apparently believing that longstanding authoritarian rule was the only thing protecting religious minorities in the Arab world from unbridled persecution.

But before the narrative of Obama's "Arab Problem" conveniently replaces his "Muslim Problem" in the run-up to the 2012 presidential election, it is instructive to examine the actual posture of this administration toward Arab revolutions from Tunisia to Yemen...