handed approach to the Middle East has won him praise from some Arab leaders viewed by previous US presidents as deadly enemies. “Obama is a flicker of hope amid the imperialist darkness,” Muammar Gaddafi told a rally of his supporters last week. The Libyan leader, once a thorn in America's side, was dubbed a “mad dog” by former President Ronald Reagan in the 1980s. He has mended ties with Washington since 2003. “He (Obama) speaks logically. Arrogance no longer exists in the American approach which was previously based on dictating to the rest of the world to meet its own conditions,” Gaddafi said. Obama has also earned conditional tributes from Syrian President Bashar Al-Assad, Palestinian Hamas chief Khaled Meshaal and Lebanon's Sayyed Mohammed Hussein Fadlallah – all at times linked by Washington with terrorism. Even non-Arab Iran's President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has recognized that Obama might offer something new. “We speak with great respect for Obama. But we are realists. We want to see real change,” he told Germany's Der Spiegel magazine. “We feel that Obama must now follow his words with actions.” The readiness of America's adversaries to acknowledge that Obama has brought a more sensitive verbal approach to the region is striking. For many in the Middle East, Obama's search for dialogue with Iran, his declaration in Turkey this month that America was not at war with Islam, his stress on a two-state solution for Israelis and Palestinians, and his plans to withdraw from Iraq constitute a reassuring change from the perceived belligerence and pro-Israeli bias of his predecessor George W. Bush. Now Arab leaders wonder whether Obama is able or willing to change the substance, not just the tone, of US policy. If so, some at least seem eager to do business with him. “It is most natural to want a meeting with President Obama,” Assad told The New Yorker's Seymour Hersh by email. Assad, whose officials conducted Turkish-mediated peace talks with Israel last year, has long called for the United States to play a more active role in Middle East peace-making. Tempered optimism Despite such hopes, Syria remains cautious. “We see what Obama said as positive,” Syrian Foreign Minister Walid Al-Moualem said in an interview with Lebanon's As-Safir newspaper last week. “But now we need to see how the United States will deal with the extreme right-wing Israeli government” led by new Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Netanyahu has not endorsed a two-state solution. His foreign minister, Avigdor Lieberman, has openly rejected it, dismissing US-backed peace talks with the Palestinians as a “dead end”. Those talks have excluded Hamas, shunned by the United States, the European Union and the United Nations for its refusal to recognize Israel or renounce violence. But Meshaal says the great powers will realize they need the Islamist group, which has ruled the Gaza Strip since routing its Fatah rivals in 2007, to resolve the Arab-Israeli conflict. “Regarding an official opening towards Hamas, it's just a matter of time,” he told Italy's La Repubblica daily last month. Meshaal, based in Damascus, hailed Obama's “new language”, adding: “The challenge for everybody is for this to be the prelude for a genuine change in US and European policies.” The United States and its allies have feuded for years with Iran, Syria and the radical groups they assist such as Hamas and the Lebanese Shi'ite Hezbollah movement. Fadlallah, a Shi'ite cleric who was close to Hezbollah in the 1980s, when kidnappers snatched many foreigners and suicide bombers struck US troops and diplomats in Lebanon, praised Obama's “human values” and his sincerity towards Islam. “But the question that presents itself is whether President Obama can realize any of these slogans when faced by the institutions that govern America and over which the president does not have complete control,” he said last week.
