Moving on

Now that the Iraq War is no longer needed as a stick to beat Republicans with, the liberal commentators are moving on. How quickly is breathtaking. Gerald Seib in today's Wall Street Journal writes that the security situation in Iraq "feels oddly settled." Whether it is due to President George W. Bush's troop surge, or alliance of friendly sheikhs and better intelligence, Seib says the turnabout now "can be left to the history books to sort out."

Ignoring for the moment Seib's irrational exuberance at moving on from the war, his larger point is that the new challenges for our new president will be elsewhere, and he cites Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Iran. (I would add Russia.) And the challenges are real, in part because candidate Barack Obama has pledged engagement in these three Islamic countries, unlike Iraq, where he calls for a "realistic withdrawal date." And while global opinion for Obama is generally viewed as positive, in the Islamic world a warm reception for the new U.S. president is by no means assured.

Celebration poured from the Middle East beginning in the wee hours, as Arabs and others awoke to the news of an Obama victory: "Mabruuk, Obama!" But the root of "mabruuk," often used in congratulations, means, "to kneel down," as opposed to the more proper "mubaarak," which means, "to bless." And so the hidden messages begin already for a president-elect who is perhaps regarded as more of a cipher in the Islamic world than he is in the West.

To my surprise on a recent Mideast trip I learned that not only minorities, including Christians, but also many Muslims view Obama with suspicion. They are confused by a man born of a Muslim father who calls himself a Christian. In that part of the world most men follow the religion of their fathers. And the Obama campaign's early refusal to release the president-elect's birth certificate and talk candidly about his early education has created lingering misgivings (he attended a Catholic school in Indonesia but his registration form for the school lists his religion as "Islam"). Some Muslims argue that anyone with Muslim roots and an Arabic middle name who says he is a Christian is legally an apostate. He will be regarded as such in some Islamic circles no matter the polite rhetoric.

In pre-election days this was a legitimate campaign issue but was rarely explored in mainstream media. Now, ironically, for a president-elect who wants to sit down in the capitals of the Islamic world "without preconditions," these are the pre-conditions he himself will face there.

What's important now are the challenges these preconditions of Obama's presidency present in the foreign policy arena. Authorities like Daniel Pipes and Amir Taheri (in a story available only as a cache after Forbes pulled it from its website) have done us a service in noting how Obama's conflicted religious past may play out on the world stage.

The campaign season rumors suggesting Obama is a closet Muslim radical or the forerunner to the third imam will persist until it becomes clear that Obama intends to turn his conflicted religious past into an asset at the negotiating table, the briefing room, and possibly the war room.

He can do this by speaking plainly about religious and ethnic oppression and the need for government protection of individual rights, including religious freedom. He can do it by assembling a dependable foreign policy team, which of necessity will include post-9/11 experts who honed their skills under the Bush administration. And he can do it if he truly will carry "the dream of our founders" he alluded to last night not to the dictators of the Islamic world but to their victims. That begins by ignoring today's call from the Taliban for Obama to withdraw U.S. troops from Afghanistan and usher in "an era of peace." And he can start with Iran, and listen to the words of dissident Banafsheh Zand-Bonazzi writing on Election Day:

"Polls taken inside Iran show that the Iranian people are the most pro-American in the Middle East, after Israel. But instead of connecting with the people of Iran, and supporting their plea for better living conditions and for democracy, Mr. Obama has chosen to deal with their oppressors, giving them a free pass even against the warnings of the European Union, which opposes the 'without precondition' part of Obama's proposal. Does the change in Foreign Policy advocated by Mr. Obama imply using the stick with our friends and the carrot with our enemies?"