As Barack Obama tours the Middle East for the first time since he won the Democratic primary, Arabs and other Middle Easterners have no illusions. It’s nice that his middle name is Hussein, the region’s consensus appears to be; it’s encouraging that he knows a thing or two about Islam, having had a Muslim father. But it’s not going to change essential facts about American policy.
Thomas Friedman wrote that Obama's nomination in Arab eyes "might mean that being labeled a “pro-American” reformer is no longer an insult here, as it has been in recent years." Maybe so. The hope is that Friedman isn't speaking too soon.
Obama in Iraq and Afghanistan
In Iraq and Afghanistan, he’ll be driven primarily by domestic policy concerns over bringing one American commitment to a close (in Iraq) while finding a way out of an open-ended commitment in the other (Afghanistan). In either case, the aim of America’s commitment is not nation-building or democracy, two goals that appear beyond the next president’s horizon.
In Iraq, it’s designed to consolidate American influence in order to protect the region’s oil resources.
In Afghanistan, it’s designed to keep al-Qaeda from regaining ground. “To defeat al Qaeda,” Obama says , “I will build a twenty-first-century military and twenty-first-century partnerships as strong as the anticommunist alliance that won the Cold War to stay on the offense everywhere from Djibouti to Kandahar.”
Visiting Them Over There So He Can Win Votes Over Here
The approach is problematic. It presumes that American interests will continue to be protected, violently if need be, over somebody else’s land. It’s the sort of presumption that did not endear George W. Bush to the people of the Middle East. It’s not likely to endear Obama to them, either.
As the Lebanon Daily Star’s Rami Khouri put it , “Obama’s visits to Afghanistan and Iraq seem to be mostly electoral events, understandably so. From the start, the center of gravity of these two wars has always been firmly in the United States. The wars were launched after September 11, 2001, to stop terrorists from attacking Americans. The justification for war may have been reasonable; almost everything else about these wars has not been."
Obama and the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict
Nor is Obama’s starting point in the Arab-Israeli conflict . If he’s elected, he’ll be following the two most pro-Israel presidents in Israel’s 60 years — Bill Clinton and George W. Bush. Obama’s approach has Israel first, Arabs a distant second, while Palestinians get the usual mix of honorable and dishonorable mention. That may benefit Obama's electoral fortunes. It won't advance Palestinian-Israeli peace.
As The Times' Nicholas Kristof wrote, "On his visit to the Middle East, Barack Obama gave ritual affirmations of his support for Israeli policy, but what Israel needs from America isn’t more love, but tougher love. Particularly at a time when Israel seems to be contemplating military strikes on Iranian nuclear sites, the United States would be a better friend if it said: 'That’s crazy' — while also insisting on a 100 percent freeze on settlements in the West Bank and greater Jerusalem."
How Arabs See Obama
In the Arab world, the sentiment is summed up by Muhammad Ibrahim, 23, a university student who works part time selling watermelons on the streets of Amman, the Jordanian capital. “What we know is American presidents all support Israel,” he told The Times . “It is hopeless. This one is like the other one. They are all the same. Nothing will change. Don’t expect change.”
Obama himself went out of his way , in his speech to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (the biggest Israel lobby organization in the world) to assure Jewish-American voters, who have his doubts about him, that he will continue to see the Middle East through Israeli eyes.
"Obama's words," Nazir Majali wrote in the London-based, pan-Arab newspaper Al Sharq Al Awsat, "were more biased toward Israel than the speeches you hear at Likud conferences."
Israel's Hold
“I’m among friends,” he told his AIPAC audience , “good friends, friends who share my strong commitment to make sure that the bond between the United States and Israel is unbreakable today, unbreakable tomorrow — unbreakable forever.” (It was a curious choice of rhetorical flourish, borrowed as it was from Alabama Gov. George Wallace’s more infamous 1963 inaugural speech: “Segregation today, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever.” )
Returning to the years of the first George Bush, when James Baker III, his secretary of state, could sit across from Israeli diplomats, scream at them to dismantle illegal settlements in Occupied lands and tell AIPAC to “give up the dream” (“now is the time to lay aside, once and for all, the unrealistic vision of a greater Israel”) is not an option. Tough love, in other words, will have to wait.
What the Middle East Trip Is Winning Obama
Most Americans, it’s safe to say, don’t keep the intricacies of the Arab-Israeli conflict (or for that matter the nuances of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan) in the back of their mind. Middle Easterners do. Those intricacies and nuances consume their lives, their thoughts, their debates, because they also decide their fate. So it’s with all those intricacies and nuances in mind that they’ve watched Obama’s July 2008 trip through the Middle East.
In the United States, Obama’s trip is having its desired effect. He’s coming across as the candidate of change and gravitas. “In a world battered and abused by the hubris of Bush-Cheney cowboy diplomacy,” my About colleague Deborah White writes , “Barack Obama looks, sounds, acts, and speaks like the statesman-diplomatic leader that the international community desperately needs from the United States.”
