Obama's Middle East challenge

Barack Obama came into office with United States fighting two wars in the Muslim world and confronting a larger struggle against violent Islamic extremism. He seeks to draw down the U.S. presence in Iraq, but he doesn't want the withdrawal of American forces to lead to chaos in that country. He has also taken steps to intensify the fight against the Taliban and al-Qaida in Afghanistan and Pakistan. He faces the conundrum of Iran and its nuclear ambitions.

The president has stressed the importance of and need for diplomacy in tackling all of these challenges, and he realizes that real diplomatic solutions will require the help of the Islamic neighbors of Iraq, Afghanistan and Iran. Enter the Israeli-Palestinian peace process.

There are plenty of reasons for an American president to try to broker peace in the Middle East. But the primary reason for this American president to take on such a Sisyphean task now, amid all the other boulders he is pushing uphill, is the persistent and explicit message from Islamic leaders that this is the key to gaining a sympathetic ear for U.S. interests in the region. If you want your interests taken care of, America — so goes the argument — then address this issue first, and we will talk.

If the need for regional cooperation on Iraq, Afghanistan and Iran were not so urgent, this would not be the time that a geopolitically savvy U.S. president would choose to engage the peace process. That Obama is doing so now — much as President Bush did in his second term — provides a measure of just how difficult is the U.S. position in the larger region.

Why, aside from the U.S. need to be seen as addressing Islamic (and Arab) concerns, is this not the optimum time to attempt an Israeli-Palestinian solution? Books could be — and have been — written in answer to this question alone, but in short: the internal politics of the Israelis and the Palestinians.

Israel's current political climate does not seem hospitable for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to even utter the words "two-state solution," much less call a halt to West Bank settlements. And the Palestinians' internal politics are being played out with gunfire, as the Fatah-ruled Palestinian Authority battles with Hamas for control of their people and their people's destiny. Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas "leads" a deeply divided political entity, with an official title that technically expired at the beginning of this year when his presidential term ended.

These are not optimal conditions for settling anything, much less a conflict that is proverbial in its long-standing resistance to any solution.

Obama is trying anyway. He has invited the Israeli and Palestinian leaders to the White House, and this week's trip to Saudi Arabia and Egypt had a broad agenda, but jump-starting the peace process was necessarily at its core. That he is trying in such a high-profile way speaks not only to the urgent and delicate nature of the U.S. position but also to this president's leadership style. Obama's Middle East gambit resembles his insistence that we must take on health-care reform now, not despite the economic crisis but because of it — because he sees it as the central thing that must be changed for the economy to recover.

If Obama's presidency manages to become a transformative one, it will likely not be because he has any ideas that are particularly unconventional, much less radical; it will be because of his propensity to seek out root problems and confront them as part of comprehensive solutions, instead of acting incrementally. Few things would be more transformative — or less expected — than a Middle East breakthrough at this point in history. And hardly anything will be more difficult.