WASHINGTON: Expectations are high as President Barack Obama prepares to leave for a trip to the Middle East in which he will address Muslims and push for a renewed Middle East peace effort.
The central event of Obama's five-day, four-country trip abroad will be a speech in Cairo. The president has said the speech will focus on how the US can build mutual understanding and improve its relationship with the Muslim world.
Obama will begin his trip by traveling to Riyadh on Wednesday to hold talks with Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques King Abdullah on the Mideast peace process, Iran's nuclear program and terrorism.
Obama will hold no public events in Riyadh but will have a private dinner with the king and spend the night in the city before heading to Egypt.
Saudi Arabia may be key to addressing the situation in Pakistan. With President Asif Ali Zardari becoming increasingly unpopular, Obama administration officials are hoping Saudi Arabia can use its leverage with Pakistani opposition leader Nawaz Sharif to work on resolving the increasing turbulence in that country.
The Riyadh visit will take place the day before Obama is to deliver his long-anticipated speech in Cairo where he is expected to speak broadly about US policy toward the Muslim world and discuss his hopes for peace in the region.
The president is expected to outline a new US approach toward the region and the Muslim world.
Much of the Arab world doubts that the US president can change entrenched foreign policy.
Obama's remarks in Egypt, though aimed at the Muslim world, also will be carefully examined in Israel, foreign policy experts say. The Obama administration is said to be carefully debating how to toughen its position against illegal Israeli settlement expansion.
"President Obama wants to see a stop to settlements - not some settlements, not outposts, not natural-growth exceptions," Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said, in a bluntly worded statement last week after meeting with Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas.
"Several American presidents, from Ronald Reagan to George W Bush, have called on Israelis to halt settlement activity, to no avail. The question now, Middle East experts said, is how far Mr. Obama is willing to go to make that happen," said the New York Times.
Since taking office, Obama has made a visible effort to re-establish good relations with the Muslim world. He gave his first interview as president to the Arabic satellite channel Al Arabiya, reached out in video message to Iranians on the Persian new year, and in a recent trip to Ankara, told Turkey's Grand National Assembly that the United States "is not and never sill be at war with Islam."
Obama also ordered Guantanamo prison closed within a year and said the US would not engage in torture, reversing two Bush policies seen by many as targeting Muslims.
A pullout of Iraqi troops according to schedule would also go a long way toward restoring Muslim confidence. But despite Obama's timetable-he plans to withdraw most U.S. troops by September 2010 and pull all out by the end of 2011-many are upset by the ongoing violence.
And, while the U.S. draws down forces in Iraq, it is building them up in another Muslim country, Afghanistan, as part of its intensifying war on the Taliban. But the Afghan government says mounting civilian deaths are undermining support for the campaign.
After Cairo, Obama will travel to a former Nazi concentration camp at Buchenwald, Germany, and then will go to Normandy, France to participate in ceremonies commemorating the 65th anniversary of the Normandy Invasion, the June 6 landings during the World War II that opened the second front against Nazi Germany, under the command of Gen. Dwight Eisenhower. Over 50,000 allied troops died in the air and on the ground during the Battle of Normandy, which lasted nearly three months following the D-Day landing.
