President Obama is far too sophisticated for this sort of blunder. He got a warm response from the audience by greeting them in Arabic. But so did Napoleon Bonaparte, who had prepared meticulously for his invasion of Egypt, and proclaimed to the Egyptians that he was a friend of Muslims who respected Islam and its Prophet. Like Obama in his speech, Bonaparte cited the Koran repeatedly. All the same, Napoleon immediately committed an irredeemable gaffe by trying to impose the French tricolor badge or cockade, which the Egyptians mistook for a religious emblem, or at the least a badge of servitude. It was only the first of the miscues that doomed Bonaparte’s expedition, as I found out when I researched the period for my book.

 So I continued to watch Obama with trepidation, even as the applause from the crowd, and text messages from friends in Egypt, reassured me that the president’s speech was playing well. I did note, when he evoked his own multicultural background, that he avoided saying his Kenyan father was a Muslim, saying instead that there were many Muslims in his father’s family. In Islam, religious affiliation is patrilineal, so Obama, a Christian, presumably wanted to steer clear of that particular hornet’s nest.

The lines in which the President invoked Islamic tradition and tolerance drew grateful applause. But other initiatives and promises addressing the grievances of Muslims in the West did not seem to resonate as much with the Cairo audience, as when he upheld the right of Muslim women in Europe to wear a headscarf, or when he promised to make it easier for Muslims in America to tithe to Islamic charities. But one must remember that Obama’s speech was addressed, not to the few thousand in the auditorium of Cairo University or even the 80 million Egyptians in the country but to the some 1.5 billion Muslims worldwide, Arab and non-Arab, in Indonesia or in Los Angeles.

Like many Egyptian-Americans or other members of Muslim minorities in the West, I was asked by the media to give my opinion on Obama’s speech. The thorniest question: Do you feel that Egypt, with its poor record on democracy and human rights, was the wrong choice of venue for this historic speech to the Muslim world? The answer, for this Egyptian-American who has been critical of many aspects of the Egyptian regime in her writing, is a resounding no. Egypt is not Mubarak, any more than America was George Bush. You can be a proud Egyptian, or a proud American, even if you disapprove of your government’s policies. And President Obama’s choice of Egypt as the heavyweight of Arab and Islamic tradition is a source of pride to the vast majority of Egyptians, even those who protest its government.

More importantly, perhaps, Obama’s speech, in spite of the hard truths of some of its passages, has gone a long way to turn the tide of anti-Americanism that had been swelling at an alarming rate over the past eight years. No, he didn’t say everything the “Muslim world” wanted to hear, nor did he mean to, but he pulled off the tightrope act.

One minor caveat: he missed an opportunity, when he was speaking of female empowerment through education, to mention one woman who had everything to do with the Cairo University in which he stood. Last January I attended the centennial commemoration of the inauguration of Cairo University in 1909, honoring an Egyptian princess whose role was critical in achieving the dream of a national university. When the state ran out of funds to complete the construction, the princess dipped into her private purse, selling some of her own land and jewelry to pay for the necessary funds. I wish someone had thought to tell President Obama that history; I am sure he would have found a way to weave it into his speech.

A Western superpower invades a Middle Eastern country with overwhelming force, under the pretext of defending its interests in the region, but in reality to expand its empire overseas. The commander of the military expedition proclaims to the shocked and awed local population that he has come to liberate them from the oppression of their rulers, and to share Western ideals of freedom, democracy, and rights for women. He professes respect for the Islamic religion, denies any intention of waging a holy war, and announces that he expects the conquered people to welcome their liberators with open arms.

No, it’s not 2003 but 1798, and Napoleon Bonaparte’s army has just landed in Egypt.

The parallels between the French invasion of Egypt two hundred years ago and Iraq today are uncanny. The reasons advanced for the French Expedition were also geopolitical, strategic and imperialist and the enterprise was equally cloaked in idealism: the natives would be liberated from ‘Oriental despotism’, and introduced to the principles of the Enlightenment. In return, the Western superpower expected to be welcomed by the conquered Egyptians with open arms.

When the French first arrived, mindful of Bonaparte’s injunction to respect Muslim sensibilities, they aimed to win hearts and minds and walked about the streets of Cairo unarmed. Within months a series of flagrant cultural missteps and the fatal dynamics of an occupation turned the population against the foreign occupiers and forced the French to retrench behind the fortifications of the Ezbekiah, their ‘Green Zone’. Within their compound, the French tried to recreate Paris, including the Tivoli pleasure palace with theatre, dancing, music and wine, just as US forces today recreate a self-contained American environment complete with McDonald’s and video arcades.

Then as now, native interpreters, guides, and all those who served the occupier found themselves at risk of retaliation when the evacuation of the occupying army was imminent. For the French then, as for the coalition forces today, the responsibility of protecting the locals who served under them loomed large. A particularly heartbreaking dilemma faced the men and women who were caught in cross-cultural liaisons. General Menou himself, the high commander in Egypt at the time of the evacuation, was married to a Muslim woman. Many of the lesser men in his position left their Egyptian paramours behind to meet their fate, but Menou took his wife with him back to France, as some American servicemen have done with Iraqi women. An article in Time magazine last year reported the poignant personal stories of several such couples.

As the election of Barack Obama makes an eventual evacuation all but inevitable, the French expedition can serve as a model for one of several possible outcomes: what happens in the aftermath? In the case of Egypt, it was the worst case scenario that prevailed: the sectarian strife exacerbated by the occupation segued into the horrors of all-out civil war and Egypt descended into unprecedented chaos and conflict. In the vacuum, local, regional and international powers made a play for dominance and militias jockeyed for power so that yesterday’s enemies turned into today’s allies and vice versa. Hopefully, with the benefit of history, the worst case scenario can, and will, be avoided in Iraq.

Samia Serageldin is the author of The Naqib’s Daughter, a novel based on the true story of how an unscrupulous Egyptian notable pushes his daughter into a liaison with a Frenchman, and the consequences for the girl when the French leave.