July 27, 2008	Sunday	Rajab 23, 1429

WASHINGTON: Barack Obama’s electoral rival is John McCain, but Obama’s overseas trip this week has given heartburn to another Republican President Bush.

In stop after stop across the Middle East and Europe, Obama was embraced as the man whose promise of change meant a change from Bush: on Iraq, Middle East peace, the treatment of terrorism suspects, climate change, alliance relations and more.

The tour has brought into focus how world leaders are positioning themselves for a new American president.

In Baghdad, Iraqi leaders who have appeared to be intimate allies of the White House suddenly were saying they wanted the kind of rough deadline for US troop withdrawal that Obama has endorsed and Bush repeatedly has rejected.

In Jerusalem, key leaders signalled they could accept Obama’s proposal for high-level talks with Iran, an approach that Bush labeled “appeasement” in an appearance at the Knesset, Israel’s legislature, only last spring.

Obama’s debut appearance on the international stage was the most vivid demonstration yet that the world is moving beyond the Bush era, even while the White House works frantically in its last six months to salvage what it can of its foreign policy agenda.The trip had to come as a jolt for administration officials, said Wayne White, a senior US State Department intelligence official in Bush’s first term. “I’m sure it was a bit rattling for the administration to see someone treated with such deference,” he said.

The Iraq visit brought to light frictions in the US-Iraqi relationship and might have jeopardised the Bush’s administration’s chances of concluding negotiations over the US military role in Iraq that the administration had hoped to wrap up by the end of the year.

Last weekend, in tense exchanges, administration officials succeeded in persuading Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki partially to take back his July 18 comment to the German magazine Der Spiegel that he favoured Obama’s plan to withdraw US combat troops from Iraq in 16 months. Yet when Obama arrived in Baghdad on Monday, al-Maliki spokesman Ali Dabbagh set aside that promise and said that withdrawing troops by the end of 2010, a few months past the timetable suggested by Obama, sounded just about right.

The comments appeared to change the debate from the question of whether the United States could draw down in Iraq to how to deal with the next challenge, the militant threat in Afghanistan and Pakistan. That’s the discussion Obama has been urging.

Israeli leaders have been steadfastly loyal to Bush, and sometimes described him as the strongest supporter of Israel ever to inhabit the Oval Office.

Yet last week, several Israelis including former prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu of the hawkish Likud Party signalled they were ready to set aside Bush’s insistence that it would be foolish to talk with the Iranians unless they first halted nuclear activities that could give them the ability to make a bomb. These Israelis said they were willing to accept Obama’s plans to talk to top Iranian leaders as a means of exhausting diplomatic possibilities.

Nathan J. Brown, a specialist in Arab politics at George Washington University, said Obama’s visit came at a time when the Bush administration has a “very weak hand” in the Middle East because of “its failure to build strong partnerships, the unrealistic goals it has set, the overstretch in terms of military positions, and the natural effects of reaching the end of the term”.

The trip “may have highlighted this weak position and prompted some regional leaders to position themselves toward a new administration”, Brown wrote in an email.

In France on Friday, President Nicolas Sarkozy who has gone out of his way to repair relations with Bush presented himself as Obama’s “buddy” and said France would be “delighted” to see the Democratic candidate elected as the next US president. Sarkozy said the two share “converging” views on issues including climate change and Iran’s nuclear programme.

Obama’s appearance with Sarkozy contrasted with McCain’s low-key visit to Europe and the Middle East in March. There was no joint news conference for McCain in Paris; he answered journalists’ questions in a courtyard without Sarkozy.

White House officials insisted Friday that their relationships with the Iraqis and Israeli governments remain strong and that Obama’s conversations were not disrupting plans.

“We’re not going to let this trip be a distraction,” Press Secretary Dana Perino said.

Perino otherwise refused to talk about Obama’s trip but said pointedly that when Bush and the Iraqis decide a “general time horizon” for a change in the US role, “these will not be dates plucked out of thin air based on an American political calendar or based on an American, you know, inside the Beltway decision of, we think this would be a good date to remove troops”.

Conservatives objected that Obama’s presidential-style appearance to an adulatory crowd in Berlin was presumptuous, and some predicted there would be an American backlash against a candidate who had such backing from foreigners.

One US official acknowledged that the administration was fully aware that its standing, as much as McCain’s, was on the line. “The message would be pretty hard to miss,” said the official, who insisted on remaining unidentified because he was not authorised to speak on the subject.

In his single appearance before a large crowd, at the Victory Column in Berlin, Obama offered a generally conciliatory message about the need for Americans and Europeans to work together on their common interests.

Although his language was muted, it was still clear that he was offering himself as the un-Bush, promising a less ideological American partner who would join forces on climate change, “reject torture and stand for the rule of law”, and work together for nuclear disarmament.

“The walls between old allies on either side of the Atlantic cannot stand,” he said.Obama’s speech contained a number of messages less welcome to the Germans, including that their military needs to take on a bigger and more dangerous role in Afghanistan.

Der Spiegel, the German magazine, cautioned its audience before Obama’s arrival that they might not like what they hear from “the American idol”. Yet Europeans, it said, “have fallen in love with Obama mostly because he’s not Bush”.—Dawn/ The LAT-WP News Service (c) Los Angeles Times