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.
