Close up:

Great expectations

By Salama A Salama

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Obama's promise of change has left many nations around the world with great expectations. No wonder, considering the legacy of the Bush administration, the wars, the endless disasters, and a grinding financial crisis to top it all.

The greatest fascination among people in this part of the world is the normalcy of it all: how eight years of Bush ended with a man of black and Muslim origins in the White House, and how smoothly the whole thing went. Not the kind of thing that our ossified and recalcitrant political regimes can pull off.

It must have been worrying for Arab leaders to watch this course of events unfolding. If you're an Arab leader, the last thing you need is your people realising the full range of political possibilities. Arab leaders would have felt safer with a McCain victory. They may not have agreed with the policies of the Bush administration, but they have learned how to live with them. So McCain would not have been so bad after all.

We don't know yet what policies the Obama administration will have towards Iraq and Iran. In his first press conference, Obama said something about opposing Iran's possession of nuclear weapons but being ready to talk to Tehran with no conditions. This too may have worried some Arab governments. Our leaders may have expressed distaste for the use of military force in the Gulf, urging diplomatic and economic pressures instead, but they are not particularly for improved relations between Tehran and Washington. In their reckoning, the closer Washington gets to Iran, the less it needs Arab countries.

Incidentally, we have no idea what the Obama administration intends to do with the Arab-Israeli conflict or the Palestinian issue. To a large extent, the Palestinian Authority has embraced the US vision of a Palestinian state, even to the point of taking part in the sanctions against Hamas. Israel, meanwhile, saw no reason to desist from acts of aggression against the Palestinians. Nor has it slowed down the pace of building new settlements.

No wonder Egypt's bid for national dialogue among various Palestinian factions foundered so fast. The power struggle between Fatah and Hamas continued even as Secretary of State Rice bade farewell to the region and admitted the failure of the Bush administration in giving birth to the two-state solution.

The Bush administration is handing down to Obama a long history of failure, an endless record of futile negotiations, a long list of resolutions the Quartet has considered over the years, documents about the roadmap, ideas emanating from Annapolis, but no tangible modicum of progress.

With the Arabs not asking for much, and the Israelis busy with elections of their own, Obama has no reason to rush to any rash conclusions. The Palestinian-Israeli conflict can wait, at least until the Palestinians figure out what exactly they want.

Sadly enough, the Palestinians have had so much disagreement over the years, they are losing track of time. They are no longer capable of seeing the damage their infighting is causing to their cause. They have become inured to the toll their differences are taking on their common future.

Any hopes the Arabs may have pinned on Obama are likely to end in disappointment. The new US president will be working through advisers, talking to congressmen, trying to regulate financial institutions, and listening to the intelligence services. And with the Democratic Party's close links to Israel, Arab concerns are unlikely to feature prominently in the US agenda for some time to come.