Obama pledges to take swift action on Mideast

Hurriyet Daily News with wires

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U.S. President-elect Barack Obama yesterday vowed to take swift action on the Middle East peace process and Iran's nuclear ambitions, but played for time to shut down the Guantanamo Bay prison camp. In an interview with ABC's This Week program broadcast yesterday, Obama defended his reluctance to speak out on Israel's deadly offensive in Gaza before he succeeds President George W. Bush on Jan. 20.

But while he promised rapid efforts on the peace process and diplomatic engagement with Iran, Obama said it would be a "challenge" to close the Guantanamo Bay prison camp in his first 100 days in office. "What I am doing right now is putting together the team so that on January 20th, starting on day one, we have the best possible people who are going to be immediately engaged in the Middle East peace process as a whole," he said in an interview with ABC's This Week program.

Strategic approach
The team would "be engaging with all of the actors there. That will work to create a strategic approach that ensures that both Israelis and Palestinians can meet their aspirations," Agence France-Presse quoted Obama as saying.

Until then, he said again that he would leave the administration of Bush to speak on foreign policy but indicated some continuity to the peace process. "I think that if you look not just at the Bush administration, but also what happened under the (Bill) Clinton administration, you are seeing the general outlines of an approach," Obama said in the interview taped Saturday.

Under the Bush administration, the United States has been accused by the Palestinians of siding uncritically with Israel to the detriment of the peace process overall. Obama stood by his words of July, during a visit to Israel, when he had said: "If somebody was sending rockets into my house where my two daughters sleep at night, I'm going to do everything in my power to stop that. I would expect Israelis to do the same thing." Asked by ABC if he would repeat the remark in Israel now, he said: "I think that's a basic principle of any country is that they've got to protect their citizens."

Obama, meanwhile, took note of a warning from former U.S. defense secretary William Perry Thursday that he would likely face a "serious crisis" over Iran's nuclear ambitions in his first year in office. The incoming president said he will take a new approach toward Iran that will emphasize respect for the Iranian people and spell out what the United States expects of its leaders.

"Iran is going to be one of our biggest challenges," Obama said.

Obama said he was concerned about the Islamic republic's support of the Lebanese Shiite movement Hezbollah and about Iran's nuclear enrichment, which he said could trigger a Middle East arms race, according to an account by Reuters

In a shift from Bush's policies, Obama has said he would seek much broader engagement with Iran. "We are going to have to take a new approach. And I've outlined my belief that engagement is the place to start," he said.

Obama said that approach would include "sending a signal that we respect the aspirations of the Iranian people, but that we also have certain expectations in terms of how an international actor behaves. "We are in preparations for that. We anticipate that we're going to have to move swiftly in that area," Obama said.

Emphasis on rule of law
Besides, Obama also said in the interview he was not ruling out possible prosecution for abuses committed under the Bush administration, saying no one "is above the law."

"We're still evaluating how we're going to approach the whole issue of interrogations, detentions, and so forth," Obama said when asked about alleged abuses under Bush. "Obviously we're going to be looking at past practices and I don't believe that anybody is above the law," Obama said.

But Obama added that he wanted his administration to focus on tackling problems moving forward, rather than reviewing policies under his predecessor. "My instinct is for us to focus on how do we make sure that moving forward we are doing the right thing."

When asked about his promise to close the controversial prison at Guantanamo Bay, which still holds some 250 "war on terror" suspects, Obama said: "It is more difficult than I think a lot of people realize.

He said his legal and national security advisers were working out the best approach. But Obama added emphatically that the base would be closed. "I don't want to be ambiguous about this," the president-elect said.