Obama to redefine Mideast policy

Two years after a famous speech to the Muslim world, Barack Obama, US president, is once again seeking to bolster the US’s image in the Middle East and consolidate its role in a region that has been transformed.

In a high-profile address on Thursday, Mr Obama will set the tone for US policy on Syria, Israel and the Palestinians, and the Arab world as a whole.

He is expected to elaborate on aid plans for the new governments in Egypt and Tunisia, increase pressure on Syria – whose president, Bashar al-Assad, was subjected to new US sanctions on Wednesday – and reinforce US backing for the protest movements that have swept the region.

A senior administration official added that the death of Osama bin Laden at the hands of US special forces also played into the picture Mr Obama was presenting.

“What we want to do is to reframe this as not only an enormous operational success but really a pivotal moment,” the official said, contrasting “the nihilist view that al-Qaeda was offering and the fact that we have an opportunity now where people in the Arab and Islamic world are focusing on realising their own aspirations in a positive way, which in many ways corresponds with our own vision”.

But in the wake of his much feted June 2009 Cairo speech, which raised expectations of a breakthrough that never came on Israel and the Palestinians, Mr Obama has limited room for manoeuvre in dealing with regional public opinion that is far from friendly.

A Pew Research Poll released this week said that only 20 per cent or less of respondents were favourable to the US in Jordan, Turkey, Egypt and the Palestinian territories – about the same levels as last year and in several cases significantly down on 2009.

Such results are all the more important since the protests in the Arab world have empowered public opinion in much of the region as never before. US officials acknowledge, for instance, that the Arab spring – and accompanying anti-Americanism – have complicated plans to keep US troops in Iraq beyond this year.

One challenge for the president is to shape the US’s disparate responses into a more coherent policy at a time when the US is involved in a military operation in Libya to protect civilians but has kept its ambassador in Damascus, even though Washington says almost 1,000 people have been killed there.

Officials suggest that Mr Obama will save any push on the Arab-Israeli conflict until closer to September, when the UN is expected to vote on recognising a Palestinian state, and instead focus on the increasingly bloody crackdown on Syria.

While much of the state department has been pushing for the US president to set out “parameters” for an Israeli-Palestinian deal – as have the US’s European allies – the White House has resisted.

“The real concern in the administration is having nothing when the Palestinians try to launch their statehood initiative, which is all the more reason not to play this now,” said Aaron David Miller, a former senior US diplomat now at the Woodrow Wilson Center.

Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister, who is due to meet Mr Obama on Friday, is expected to argue that it is the Palestinians who have turned their back on the peace process.