U.S. State Department photo

One fascinating subplot of the Middle East peace talks in Washington this week is the role of Egyptian president/dictator Hosni Mubarak. The 82-year old Mubarak, who has long governed Egypt with an iron fist--but has served as a useful strategic partner for America--is very old, visibly frail, and possibly cancer-ridden. For many months he has been grooming his westernized son, Gamal, for a smooth succession into the presidency, and the fact that Gamal has joined his father in Washington this week was clearly about something more than tourism. (I'd love to know how engaged Gamal may be in the Israeli-Palestinian talks, particularly given that his father's lucidity is suspect nowadays.)

More substantively, while the Mubarak regime may be grossly repressive and anti-democratic, one thing you can say for Hosni and son is that they sing a quite reasonable tune about Israel and the peace process. They loathe Hamas (albeit for selfish reasons: Hamas despises the Egyptian regime for its good relations with Israel), and Hosni's vision of the peace process as explained in the New York Times op-ed page this week was quite admirable for a leader whose population is virulently anti-Israel. Of course, the Mubaraks have an incentive to play along with Obama, because by all accounts Egypt is terrified by the rise of Iran and is very keen on working with America to blunt Persian influence in the region.

And don't think that's not extremely important to the Obama White House. You'll recall that when Obama delivered his address to the Muslim world from Cairo last summer, he largely soft-pedaled the question of human rights and democracy there--an issue George W. Bush tried to emphasize briefly, before concluding it was more trouble than it was worth. But that's a change in worldview for Obama. Writing about Obama and Iraq this week, I went back and read his famous 2002 speech against the war, which included this passage:

You want a fight, President Bush? Let's fight to make sure our so-called allies in the Middle East, the Saudis and the Egyptians, stop oppressing their own people, and suppressing dissent, and tolerating corruption and inequality, and mismanaging their economies so that their youth grow up without education, without prospects, without hope, the ready recruits of terrorist cells.

Of course, those words were spoken in 2002, back when America could better afford to talk trash about the Saudis and Egyptians. Now that he's president, dueling with Iran and trying to restore America's strategic position, Obama clearly believes that so-called "moderate" Middle Eastern regimes are too important to be hectored in such terms. Enough so that the Carnegie Endowment's Robert Kagan warns that Gamal's attendance in Washington this week will be derided on the Egyptian street and elsewhere in the Arab world as "as the US giving its blessing to this latest chapter in Egypt's long history of dictatorship." But that's just fine with Hosni and Gamal Mubarak.

TIME's Katy Steinmetz files this report:

Like a deserted wife who, years after the fact, still insists her husband is due home any day, AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka seems a bit out of touch. Making the traditional Labor Day rounds, his assertions about what voters will be swayed by and how races will pan out this fall just don't jibe with the zeitgeist (or the poll numbers). Here are three examples of positions that might elicit a sidelong glance and puns about “da Nile.”

1. Trumka said yesterday at a press conference that “There will be no Speaker Boehner,” and continued to assert this morning at a Christian Science Monitor breakfast that there's pretty much no way Republicans will gain control of the House or the Senate.

While, sure, nothing is certain, a Gallup poll released a few days ago showed an “unprecedented” lead for Republicans on the generic ballot. Estimates of how many seats they'll gain in the House have been hovering around the 45 to 50 range, and they need 39 to take the reins. And while the upper-house outlook isn't quite so bad for Democrats, with estimates ranging just below the 10-seat mark that Republicans need to hit, prognosticator Larry Sabato points out that of the six times the House has flipped since World War II, “the Senate flipped too, even when it had not been predicted to do so. These few examples do not create an iron law of politics, but they do suggest an electoral tendency.”

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Let the people decide.

It seems this President is destined to make the toughest and most convoluted political arguments of any recent occupant of the office: We had to bail out the bankers in order to save your jobs. Our stimulus package prevented something far worse than the current, limping economy from overwhelming us. And tonight: the war in Iraq was a tremendous waste of lives and dollars, and the money should have been spent here at home, but we fought it honorably--for the most part--and we should be pleased that the Iraqis may manage to build themselves a stable society.

This isn't easy. And it may just be me, but the President's discomfort seemed evident tonight--or maybe it's just that sitting down, with his hands clasped before him, staring into the camera isn't his best venue for public speaking. Or it may be that announcing the end of a foolish mission requires a certain stiffness and sobriety.

There is also the matter of audiences, as our soon-to-be colleague Fareed Zakaria has just pointed out on CNN. This was not just a speech for the American people. It was also a speech for the Iraqi people--and the Afghan people. You can bet that the commitments he made to the Iraqis will be front page news in Baghdad tomorrow...and the warning that he gave the Afghans--that our commitment is limited--will be big news in Kabul. Those were important messages to send. Of necessity, the message he sent to Americans--we're going to focus on the economy--had to take a subordinate place in the speech: yet another difficult argument to make. And unfortunately, he made it with neither freshness nor much conviction.

In the end, the note he sounded over and over was about our troops and the remarkable job they did under scandalous circumstances. As he spoke, I could not help but remember the absence of a credible plan when we got to Baghdad, the shoddy equipment, the unarmored humvees, the absence of sufficient troops to bring order to the mission, the arrogance of Donald Rumsfeld, the illegal meddling done by  Dick Cheney. Obama graciously neglected to mention any of these.

In even the most worthy wars, it is difficult for families who've lost loved ones to believe that the victory was worth the life destroyed. In a questionable war, those sacrifices ramify and haunt the survivors--that is why the incidence of post-traumatic stress disorder is so high among Iraq veterans. But it is important to honor those who fought and those who died. As the President said, in the most touching line of the speech:

As one staff sergeant said, “I know that to my brothers in arms who fought and died, this day would probably mean a lot.”

And so this speech was a necessary ceremony of the presidency, if a thankless one. The commentators will say the President didn't transcend. His critics will say that he refused to acknowledge the "success" of the surge. But he also refused to indulge in relitigating the stupidity that launched the war. The lines will be recorded in history:

So tonight, I am announcing that the American combat mission in Iraq has ended. Operation Iraqi Freedom is over...

But the moment won't be remembered any more fondly than the end of the Korean conflict. The best that can be said is that we survived Iraq. The best that can be said about the President tonight is that he survived, too, yet another very difficult moment in his presidency.

A few hours before President Obama's Oval Office speech on Iraq, Brian Katulis and Larry Korb of the Center for American Progress are out with an interesting take on what's happened in that country since George W. Bush's much-debated 2007 troop surge. They argue, as others often do, that it wasn't a relatively minor  boost in American troops that calmed Iraq's vicious sectarianism. But unlike most other commentators, who argue variously that the civil war had burned itself out and that the Sunni Awakening was a phenomenon unrelated to the surge, they argue that it was growing talk within American policy circles about setting a deadline for troop withdrawals that, in effect, scared the Iraqis straight:

Deadlines for a strategic redeployment of U.S. forces from Iraq -- initially proposed in 2005 by leaders like former Representative Jack Murtha, championed by Democrats in Congress and candidates in the 2006 midterm elections, and outlined by the 2006 bipartisan Iraq Study Group -- all sent the important signal that Iraqis needed to take greater responsibility and ownership of their own affairs. The message that America's commitment to Iraq was not open-ended motivated forces such as the Sunni Awakenings in Anbar province to partner with the U.S. to combat Al Qaeda in 2006, a movement that began long before the 2007 surge of U.S. forces.

The message that Americans were leaving also motivated Iraqis to sign up for the country's security forces in record numbers. The "surge" of U.S. troops to Iraq was only a modest increase of about 15 percent -- and smaller if one takes into account the reduced number of other foreign troops, which fell from 15,000 in 2006 to 5,000 by 2008. In Anbar province, the most violent area, only 2,000 troops were added.

Among those who embraced this concept--the idea that withdrawal from Iraq served as a a political lever that brought down violence--was Barack Obama. "Removing our troops is part of applying real pressure on Iraq's leaders to end their civil war," he argued in late 2007. Assuming he agrees at least in part with Katulis and Korb, the question is whether Obama believes there's a lesson here that can be applied to that other American war. As the two authors write:

What does this experience tell us for Afghanistan? Not setting a deadline fosters moral hazard and a dysfunctional dependency on the United States. Also, a deadline accelerates the process of helping local actors achieve a more sustainable balance of power within their own country without relying on the crutch of foreign troops. Finally, a deadline focuses attention and motivates actors to take control of their own affairs -- they are also essential for getting sometimes sluggish U.S. government bureaucracies to produce results.

Therefore, in his speech Obama should point out that his decision to begin our withdrawal from Afghanistan in the summer of 2011 remains firm and that it offers the best hope for us and the Afghan people because it will motivate them to take control of their own affairs and increase their own security forces....

I suspect Obama basically agrees with this sentiment. I think it's clear his top generals don't. Whether and how that apparent disagreement gets remains one of the core quandaries of this presidency.

With all due respect to my colleagues, this focus on religion and God isn't anything new from Glenn Beck. His most recent foray has been a sustained attack this year on churches that preach "social justice," arguing just a month ago that "Social justice isn't in the Bible." Beck had to alter his message slightly for this weekend's event, both because it's easier to rally people for God than against social justice, but also because it would be kind of awkward to spend the day hating on social justice when that was pretty much at the core of Martin Luther King Jr.'s theology.

Beck's attacks on social justice have not gone over well with the millions of American Christians--including most Catholics--who consider social justice to be a key part of their religious tradition. But even the broader message of religious revival that Beck preached on Saturday is getting him in trouble with Christians across the theological spectrum. The most stinging criticism has come from Russell Moore, dean of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, who warns Christians not to fall for "vacuous talk about undefined 'revival' and 'turning America back to God' that was less about anything uniquely Christian than about, at best, a generically theistic civil religion and, at worst, some partisan political movement."

Moore's rebuke has been approvingly reprinted everywhere from the conservative journal First Things to Relevant magazine, a publication for young evangelicals. It speaks to the distrust of Christian conservatives who feel they have been taken for granted by the GOP and largely forgotten by the Tea Party movement. And in his references to "the scandalous scene at the Lincoln Memorial," Moore's critique is not terribly different from those Christian conservatives who complained during the 2008 campaign that Obama was presenting himself as a secular Messiah. The signs "IN BECK WE TRUST" carried by rally attendees still kept God out of the picture--they just replaced Him with Beck.

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