Can Obama change the Middle East? No, he can’t

Patrick Tyler provides a misguided excuse for America’s ongoing role in the catastrophe that is the Middle East, says Charles Glass

FIRST POSTED JANUARY 6, 2009

Many Americans who voted for Barack Hussein Obama are hoping that his administration will at last break with America's traditional, and invariably harmful, behaviour in the Middle East.

That would mean letting American oil companies fend for themselves in the free-for-all to control Mideast oil, leaving Israel's colonists on the West Bank to pay their own way and abandoning the dictatorships in Egypt and Saudi Arabia to face the wrath of their populations without protection from American weapons and spies. And that is as likely as President Obama naming Ralph Nader to head the Securities and Exchange Commission and Patrick Fitzgerald, the US Attorney now prosecuting Obama's Democratic Party comrades in Illinois, to be Attorney General.

Obama has improved the rhetoric, but no one who asked Hillary ("annihilate Iran") Clinton to preside over the State Department or the failed Clinton-era hatchet man Dennis Ross to advise on Palestine has any intention of making the Middle East safe for democracy.

Obama’s silent approval of Israel’s vicious assault on the Gaza Strip is indicative of what we should expect

America's right to intervene is too deeply ingrained a concept in the American body politic to be overturned by a president who needs funds to run again in four years. The modern history of American interference in the Middle East weighs heavily.

And it does not matter that the policies show every appearance of failure: no peace from an interminable "peace process" between Palestinians and Israelis; a declining standard of living in the region that pre-dated world economic recession by a generation; the lack of accountability, transparency and honesty in regimes that the US has fought to maintain in power; and the abundant hatred of American policy even among middle classes who otherwise would welcome trade and cooperation with the western world.

Despite his promises, does Obama - pictured in Iraq last July - really have any intention of making the Middle East safe for democracy?

These apparent failures are viewed as the "price worth paying" for Israel to intensify its occupation of the West Bank, for US corporations to have easy access to Arab oil and for American weapons companies to recycle the petro-dollars with arms sales that cripple local economies and cost thousands of lives.

The White House - so long as the person presiding in the Oval Office comes from the Republican or Democratic Parties - won't change. Nor, therefore, will the Middle East. (Read John R MacArthur's just published You Can't Be President (Melville House, New York) to understand how presidential politics work.)

The priorities remain the same for Obama as for his predecessors: oil comes first, and tied for second are the