WAITING FOR OBAMA

Al-Ahram Weekly

April 10 2009
Egypt

Reaching out to the Muslim world from Turkey, Barack Obama skilfully
built bridges destroyed by his predecessor, though the real work in
US deeds lies ahead, writes Ayman El-Amir*

By his visit to Turkey, US President Barack Obama has come as close
to the seething Middle East scene as he possibly could without
catching the heat. President Obama’s first business in a tall order
of priorities was to contain the massive damage wreaked by eight
years of the Bush administration’s policies on US-Turkish relations
and on the wider Middle East region. While trying to repair the
damage and re- establish ties with a key NATO ally and a symbolic
gateway to the Muslim world, the US president was unlikely to get too
close for comfort to substantive critical issues beyond broad policy
statements. He has shown goodwill and put out feelers to gauge the
problems of the Middle East from the perspective of an independent
ally that straddles East and West. Obama is grooming Turkey, with
its diverse regional relations, as a credible mediator for engaging
partners in intractable Middle East problems.

Turkey is well positioned to play a positive role in the Middle
East. It has many friends and virtually no enemies in the region. It
opposed the invasion of Iraq in 2003 and, by a vote of parliament,
denied US and British troops access to Incirlik air base facilities
for staging that invasion. This had shamed some Arab countries
that gave land, air and sea passage to the invading Anglo-American
troops. Now the US needs Turkish bases to facilitate the planned
military withdrawal from Iraq. Turkey has also contributed some troops
to NATO forces in Afghanistan, which is a focus issue for President
Obama. Turkey is also the southernmost NATO outpost and an aspiring
candidate for European Union membership. Should it play its hand
successfully in Middle Eastern affairs, including the problems of
terrorism, illegal immigration and the Arab-Israeli conflict, which
are of keen interest to Europe, it could add invaluable credentials
to its bid for EU membership.

It could possibly override French President Nicolas Sarkozy’s
opposition that is based on religious-racial grounds. Above all, Obama
sent a clear message to the estimated 1.5 billion Muslims throughout
the world that the US "is not at war with Islam" — a policy that the
Bush administration did not seem to articulate in words nor formulate
into action since the events of 11 September 2001.

In his statement to the Turkish parliament, Obama lauded Turkey as
"a strong, vibrant, secular democracy — a republic that commands
the respect of the US and the rest of the world". He could not have
made these statements so openly in any other Middle Eastern country
without having his hosts secretly squirming in their seats. By holding
up Turkey as a model partner, Obama was sending out a strong signal
to other Middle East countries which are ruled by either theocratic or
autocratic regimes. While affirming the positive, Obama is not unaware
of the difficulties that complicate the Middle East situation. For
his reiterated strong commitment to a two-state solution to the
Arab-Israeli conflict, US Middle East policy faces a radical right-wing
Israeli government, a divided Arab world with narrow-minded leaders,
a Palestinian movement in conflict, a hard-healing Iraq, an adamant
Iran that is suspicious of US invitations for engagement and medieval
ruling regimes that choke the Arab people. Even Turkey itself is
not free of some lurking problems. Whether it is the threat of the
terrorist wing of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party or the conspiring
military of which 86 members are on trial for planning a military
coup against the elected government of the Justice and Development
Party. Indeed, Turkey is not fully "the stable democracy" that the
US president praised. On another front, President Obama skilfully
skirted the Armenian genocide issue by establishing a discreet parallel
between dark events in the history of the US — the slavery era —
and the Armenian legacy of the Ottoman Empire.

Obama conceded that he came to Turkey, the last leg of his European
tour, with a message of conciliation towards the Islamic world. It was
a message well-delivered and well-received but, as usual, the devil is
in the detail. The anti-Muslim hostility reared by the ugly legacy of
George W Bush needs to be reversed, primarily within the US itself and
in the conduct of policy with Muslim nations. Turkey could help soften
up the tone and substance between the two sides. Building bridges of
mutual trust could help ease confrontational attitudes. But whatever
initiative Turkey could undertake would require US leverage. Turkey’s
mediation between Syria and Israel for a settlement of the occupied
Golan Heights issue seems to have reached a dead-end with the rise
of the new Israeli government that has excluded, in the words of its
fundamentalist foreign minister, Avigdor Lieberman, withdrawal from
the occupied Syrian territory. Obama may have well been directing
his remarks to that government when he declared his strong support
for the establishment of a Palestinian state living side by side in
peace with Israel. The Netanyahu government does not foresee a two
state solution but rather an "economic solution" for the Palestinians
— a way to wiggle out of a political settlement that recognises the
rights of the Palestinians to statehood. At the time President Obama
is recommitting US policy to a just and lasting settlement of the
Middle East conflict, a new Israeli government is bent on pushing
the peace process back into a bottomless abyss.

Another key issue that Obama shares with Turkey, his European allies
and the rest of the world is how to combat terrorism — a worldwide
scourge. However, to combat terrorism it has to be put in the proper
perspective. Israel confused the issue of the anti- occupation struggle
of the Palestinians, lumped it together with terrorism and sold it
to a mediocre George Bush. The fact is that Muslims do not get out
of the wrong side of the bed every day thinking who they are going
to blow up next. Obama and his White House team will have to analyse
the root-causes of terrorism; not to find justifications, but to
better understand the phenomenon and thus help reverse it. There is
no military solution to violence, whether in Palestine, Pakistan or
Afghanistan. It does not help either to support state terrorism by
Israel — with an overkill response — on the pretext that "it has
the right to defend itself."

Obama’s most serious challenge, perhaps, is pressuring autocratic
regimes of the region that use chameleonic tactics to perpetuate
themselves in power and resist overwhelming popular demand for
change. In a region where the urge for change is pushing against a
wall of iron-fist dictatorships, the confrontation is explosive and
could spill over into large-scale violence. The environment provides
fertile ground for sowing the seeds of hatred and terrorism. The Bush
administration either turned a blind eye or endorsed false pretences
of reform that went nowhere. The region is volatile and the sectarian
politics the US invasion introduced in Iraq has recently begun to
bear poisonous fruit.

In a world that is still smarting from the global financial crisis that
has left no nation untouched, it is refreshing to have a different
president like Barack Obama reaching out to the Muslim "enemies" of
George W Bush. His message to the new Ottomans of the Middle East
that it is "business unusual" is worth pursuing with action. For,
unlike Waiting for Godot, Obama does come.

* The writer is former Al-Ahram correspondent in Washington, DC. He
also served as director of United Nations Radio and Television in
New York.