US President Barack Obama is beginning to get a reputation for never failing to disappoint. People everywhere shared so many high hopes for the man who promised “change”, but after seven months in office the only real change is the White House dog. As Obama’s approval ratings hover around 50 percent, he is spending most of his time struggling with the economy and trying to sell a controversial health-care plan to a skeptical nation — two very unglamorous pursuits.

On the foreign policy front you would be forgiven for imagining that George W. Bush is still pulling the strings. No change on Afghanistan and Iraq. No closure of the US gulag on Cuba. No cessation of the CIA’s rendition program. Moreover, he’s going with the same old Middle East “road map” and the same old hostile stance toward Iran.

It looks as though Obama represents the other side of Bush’s coin. Whereas, Bush didn’t care a jot about angering the world, Obama wants to please everybody all of the time and ends up pleasing nobody. Whereas, Bush barged around with hobnail boots to implement his unpopular policies, Obama tiptoes around on eggshells in the hope all will come right in the end.

What happened to the promises in his video-taped New Year message to the Iranian people when he offered a new beginning “grounded in mutual respect?” What happened to his pre-election plan of holding face-to-face unconditional talks with the Iranian leadership?

The Iranians broadly received America’s apparent volte-face and President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said his country would welcome such discussions provided they were held “in a fair atmosphere with mutual respect.” But for some reason not only have they never materialized, as each day passes the prospect of them doing so dims. Obama has turned out to be little more than a smiley face on the establishment: Israel must be appeased. Iran is fair game.

Rather than warm to Iran, which was his original intention, he has placed it on the table like a kilo of tomatoes in the souk as a bargaining chip to lure Israel into ceasing settlement expansion. According to a report in The Guardian citing US, Israeli, Palestinian and European officials, Obama will pressurize Iran to stop uranium enrichment in return for Israel halting new construction on Palestinian land.

For Obama it’s a no-win situation. Attempting to achieve peace between Israelis and Palestinians while Benjamin Netanyahu holds the top job in Israel, has echoes of the Corinthian King Sisyphus who was condemned to rolling a boulder up a hill only to see it roll down again throughout eternity.

The wily Netanyahu may be making all the right noises but, in the past, he has vowed never to evict “settlers” nor give up another inch of land. Netanyahu is just playing for time while ruthlessly using the peace process to manipulate the White House into giving him the green light to launch a strike on Iran’s nuclear facilities. Chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff Adm. Michael Mullen recently announced that “the window between a strike on Iran and their getting nuclear weapons is a pretty narrow window.”

Unsurprisingly, France and Germany have leapt upon the anti-Iranian bandwagon with enthusiasm threatening to implement stringent new sanctions, while Obama has come up with a September deadline by which time Iran must relinquish its right to enrich uranium or else.

In reality, Israel is the aggressor, not Iran, yet nobody in Washington dares mention Israel’s mega arsenal of nuclear weapons hidden under the umbrella of its so-called “nuclear ambiguity” policy or the fact that Israel has been openly threatening Iran with attack for several years. In a blatant attempt to intimidate Tehran, in recent weeks, Israeli warships and submarines passed through the Suez Canal while Israel has been testing its Arrow anti-ballistic missile system.

At the same time, Netanyahu has been ratcheting up the anti-Iranian rhetoric, which now verges on hysteria. During a visit to Berlin, Netanyahu likened the threat from Iran’s nuclear program to the Holocaust. “We must not allow those who want to commit mass murder, those who want to destroy the Jews, to emerge unscathed. That is our lesson from the Holocaust,” he said. During the same press conference, German Chancellor Angela Merkel disagreed with the comparison.

Furthermore, there is absolutely no proof that Iran even has a nuclear weapons program. Iranian leaders have repeatedly said that such a program would contravene their Islamic principles but as the French President Nicholas Sarkozy commented, “Frankly who believes them?”

The problem is that the West is even suspicious of reports from the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), which suggested in its most recent that Iran has improved its cooperation with the Agency and is facilitating improved IAEA monitoring of its Natanz enrichment plant. This inconvenient truth has upset Israel’s Foreign Ministry to the extent it has accused the agency’s Director-General Mohammed El-Baradei of hiding information and Iran of “throwing sand in the eyes of the international community.”

Rather than pour fuel on the embers of enmity between his country and Iran, Obama would be better employed reining in Netanyahu and using diplomacy to calm an increasingly volatile situation. The more the Israeli prime minister rants and raves, the more likely it is that Tehran will consider the manufacture of a nuclear bomb as a deterrent, especially in light of Israel’s bombing of Iraq’s Osiraq reactor in 1981.

Nobody in this part of the world wants a nuclear-armed Iran in their midst but neither do they want to be embroiled in a war that could exact a terrible toll in human life and adversely affect regional economies.

Last year, like most non-Americans sick of Bush’s neoconservative buddies and their endless “New American Century” wars, I strongly rooted for Obama. I was convinced that he would make our world safer. I believed he was strong, determined and revolutionary, whereas, instead of changing Washington, he has allowed Washington to change him. Let’s hope he wakes up before sleepwalking us into yet another conflict with frightening and unpredictable consequences.