CAIRO - Admittedly, Barack Obama was the first black president in the US White House in 2008. He was hailed by the US officials, Western intelligence agencies and media commentators as the man qualified to steer the American nation's yearning for change and reform domestically and internationally. But there were some invisible men of an inner machination of the US Congress, who laughed up their sleeves every time Obama's win was, in part, attributed to racism-free United States. Racism is deeply-seeded in the US: the acquittal, after 16 months, of George Zimmerman of charges of killing a black teenager should challenge the opposite argument. According to LA"s The Advocate journal, a jury of six white women ��" two, with husband lawyers, and with 90 per cent of participants in the trial white ��" nodded to the "killer" to walk away free! "What a miscarriage of justice," the journal lamented. A black Obama, then the junior Democrat Senator from Illinois, defeated the white Republican John McCain, the senior Senator from Arizona. The fact is that Obama is a handpicked president. Unlike McCain, Obama has inbuilt qualities and specifications (African appearance, a mixed picture of family backdrop and skills in oratory), which could help him deceptively win the hearts and minds of Arabs and Muslims to give him a piggyback ride in the region. It remains curious why throughout the US history, the Republicans are mostly warlords; and the Democrats are ostensibly firefighters and are people yearning for peacemaking. It is also all the more curious that Republicans are widely different��"genetically��"from Democrats. Compare Obama, Bill Clinton, Jimmy Charter, etc. to George W. Bush, John McCain, etc. It is also surprising that Democrats would make history in the Middle East; and Republicans leave the US White House with hands stained with blood. Therefore, Obama was picked and highlighted as the man of the moment. He was deceptively groomed and spruced up by an inner circle of decision-makers in the US Congress. His predecessor George W. Bush was detested and despised for his arrogance, xenophobia, idiocy and aggressiveness. Bush was a reminder of the white man of the colonial era. He should be responsible for the great damage he caused to the US reputation and interests in the Arab and Muslim communities. It was the Republican Bush, who exported a deadly democracy to Iraq, and destroyed Afghanistan for allegedly the sake of political and social improvements. Two humiliating setbacks first in Iraq and then in Afghanistan forced the Western intelligence agencies, in collaboration with Israel's, to change their minds about their decades-long policies and future strategies in the Muslim-dominated Middle East, especially after fundamentalism and extremism sizzled in the region, exploding outside and fuelling the anti-West hostilities to the highest alarming levels. Long-serving allies in the ME expired. Iconic leaders, such as the ex-President Hosni Mubarak in Egypt, became too old to remember their first inauguration day. In the meantime, its two wars in Lebanon in 2006 and in Gaza in 2008 alarmed Israel and the West that regional Islamists, who are loyal to the ideology of Al-Qaeda terrorist group, had changed the rules of the Arab-Israeli conflict. Islamist resistance movements, such as Hamas in Gaza, were also encouraged to adopt separatist plans. Hizbolla had attempted to break away with southern Lebanon; and Hamas fought a bloody battle against the Palestinian Liberation Organisation's Fatah to seize Gaza and declare it an independent emirate. Obama was best qualified to approach the new playmakers in the region and encourage them to broker an unprecedented deal: folding and ending the Arab nationalism and dividing the region ethnically, religiously and geographically to smaller��"and weaker��"states to give legitimate credit for a Jewish superpower in the region. Moreover, prior to his allegedly historical visit to the Middle East after his inauguration in 2009, Obama was rumoured to be a grandchild of a Muslim family. The stage was set for him to market himself as a peace preacher.
