World Crisis Online

Barack Obama has declared US support for demonstrators in the Middle East and north Africa, in comments likely to irritate US allies in countries such as Bahrain and Saudi Arabia.

The US president’s call reflected the White House’s growing willingness to endorse demonstrators’ demands for freedom throughout the region, after an initial much more guarded response to the upheaval in Egypt.

Although Mr Obama reserved his toughest language for Iran’s crackdown on demonstrators, he was uncompromising in his backing for protesters in US allies.

“My message to demonstrators going forward is your aspirations for greater opportunity, for the ability to speak your mind, for a free press, those are absolutely aspirations we support,” he said at a White House press conference, responding to a question about the balance between stability and freedom.

“We have sent a strong message to our allies in the region, saying let’s look at Egypt’s example as opposed to Iran’s example.”

Bruce Riedel, a former White House aide now at the Brookings Institution said: “After being a bit restrained over the past two years by realpolitik, Obama has found his voice.

“The bet is that the genie is out of the box and it is better to ride this than to fight it.”

But the US president also cautioned:  “As was true in Egypt, you know, ultimately what happens in each of these countries will be determined by the citizens of those countries.”

Mr Obama argued the US had been “on the right side of history” in its response to the protests in Egypt – despite being faulted by some demonstrators as being too slow to break with the government of Hosni Mubarak, and by governments in the region as too quick to give up on an ally of 30 years’ standing.

In language that echoed Martin Luther King’s struggle for civil rights and Mr Obama’s own experience as a child in Indonesia, he spoke of the “moral force” that could bring lasting change to the region.

His comments went further than previous remarks by administration officials, who have stressed the US’s private and public lobbying for governments in the region to carry out reforms.

Hillary Clinton, secretary of state, warned advocates of the status quo in a speech last month that the region’s foundations were “sinking into the sand”. However, some current and former diplomats, notably Frank Wisner, who briefly served as Mr Obama’s envoy to Egypt,  have been much more cautious.

Last week, as the Egyptian crisis reached its decisive moments, the White House took charge of the US’s public message from the state department.

Mr Riedel said the US could be particularly tested by Bahrain, home to the US navy’s fifth fleet, which has a Sunni king and a Shia-majority population that Saudi Arabia fears could move the country closer to Iran.

Despite former President George W. Bush’s similar language on the “freedom agenda”, the US had been wary of full-throated support for democracy in the Middle East since 2006 elections in the Palestinian territories brought the Islamist group Hamas to power.

But Mr Obama said “governments in the region are starting to understand” that “if you are governing these countries, you’ve got to get out ahead of change. You can’t be behind the curve. My hope is that they can operate in a way that is responsive to this hunger for change but always do so in a way that doesn’t lead to violence.”