Only rarely during his race to the White House did president-elect Barack Obama invoke his young children to dramatize a tough foreign policy position.
But last July, in the Israeli village of Sderot, America's next president said: "If somebody was sending rockets into my house where my two daughters sleep at night, I'm going to do everything in my power to stop that. I would expect Israelis to do the same."
Now, less than two weeks before Obama moves into the Oval Office, Israeli warplanes are bombing the densely populated and impoverished Gaza Strip and columns of Israeli tanks have cleaved the Palestinian enclave seeking missile launch sites. More than 600 Palestinians have been killed and a new Middle East peace initiative has shifted from vague campaign promise to presidential imperative.
In the Arab world, where President George W. Bush plumbed depths of unpopularity unmatched even at home, Obama has been awaited with fervent anticipation and perhaps unrealistic expectation -- including the hope that since the next president is African American and the son of a Muslim, Washington's backing of Israel might be tempered.
But Obama has had little to say about the current fighting in Gaza, although on Tuesday he said, "The loss of civilian life in Gaza and in Israel is a source of deep concern for me."
"Barack Hussein Obama was seen as a very different kind of president," and many expected the "wave of anti-American anger of the last eight years to quickly dissipate," said Martin Indyk, head of the Saban Center for Middle East Policy, and a former undersecretary of state in the Clinton administration.
Obama has vowed to seek an Israeli-Palestinian peace breakthrough "starting from the minute I'm sworn into office," but the raging hostilities and mounting death toll in Gaza add the latest crisis in the Middle East to an already overloaded presidential agenda.
Many observers expect Israel to have completed its major military strikes by Jan. 20 and for a new ceasefire to be in place. If so, Obama may have breathing space. If not, his neophyte administration, and especially Hillary Clinton, the new secretary of state, will be forced into action on Day 1.
Middle East experts warn there are no easy solutions and that the change in presidents won't alter the bitter enmities that make progress to peace so difficult.
But once he is president Obama will no longer enjoy the option to voice his views on one crisis -- as he did in November during the attacks on Mumbai -- while keeping silent on others like the current conflict in Gaza.
It won't be easy to piece together Obama's many -- and still disparate -- foreign policy promises into some overarching vision. He has, for instance, promised renewed effort on a Palestinian-Israeli peace, to hurry up the pace of a U.S. pullout from Iraq, to wean the United States off Arab oil, to make an overture to the ruling mullahs in Tehran, to ramp up the war in Afghanistan and, if necessary, to launch military strikes against al-Qaeda hideouts in Pakistan.
(Distributed by Scripps Howard News Service, www.scrippsnews.com.)
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