President Barack Obama speaks to military personnel at Camp Victory in Baghdad, Iraq, yesterday. Obama had to arrive by surprise for security reasons, just like Bush and Blair had to in their time.

The start of the Iraq war in 2003 marked a crucial break between the US and almost all the states of the region. "None of Iraq's neighbours, absolutely none, were pleased by the American occupation of Iraq," says the Iraqi Foreign Minister, Hoshyar Zebari.

Long-term US allies like Turkey astonished the White House by refusing to allow US troops to use its territory to invade Iraq.

Barack Obama, who made his first official visit to the country yesterday, is now trying to disengage from Iraq without appearing to scuttle or leave anarchy behind.

He is trying to win back old allies, and, as he made clear in a speech in Ankara on Monday, to end the confrontation between the US and Islam which was president Bush's legacy.

It is not easy for Mr Obama to reverse the tide of anti-Americanism or bring to an end the wars which Mr Bush began. For all the Iraqi government's claim that life is returning to normal in Baghdad the last few days have seen a crescendo of violence. The day before the President arrived six bombs exploded in different parts of Baghdad, killing 37 people.

And as much as Mr Obama would like to treat the Iraq war as ancient history, the US is still struggling to extricate itself. The very fact that the democratic president had to arrive in Iraq by surprise, as George Bush and Tony Blair invariably did, for security reasons, shows that the conflict is refusing to go away.

The Iraqi prime minister and president remain holed up in the 'green zone' most of the time. The American President could not fly into the green zone by helicopter because of bad weather but the airport road is still unsafe and Baghdad remains one of the most dangerous countries in the world.

The Iraqi political landscape too was permanently altered by the US invasion and it will be difficult to create a stable Iraqi state which does not depend on the US. Opinion polls in Iraq show that most Iraqis believe that it is the US and not their own government which is in control of their country.

One change which is to Mr Obama's advantage is that the American media has largely stopped reporting the conflict because they no longer have the money to do so and a majority of Americans think the war was won. But the danger for the president is that if there is a fresh explosion in Iraq, he may be blamed for throwing away a victory that was won by his predecessor.

The rhetoric with which the US conducts its diplomacy is easier to change than facts on the ground in Iraq or Afghanistan. Mr Obama's speech to the Turkish parliament in Ankara was a carefully judged bid to reassure the Muslim world that the US is not at war with Islam. Everything he said was in sharp contrast to George Bush's bellicose threats post 9/11 about launching a "crusade".

Mr Obama's effort to make a U-turn in American policy towards the Islamic world will ultimately depend on how far he changes US policy towards Israel and the Palestinians, the occupation of Iraq, the confrontation with Iran and Syria and the war in Afghanistan.

The Iranians, for instance, note that despite Mr Obama's friendlier approach to them the US official in Washington in charge of implementing sanctions against them is a hold-over from the Bush administration.

The American confrontation with Islam post 9/11 always had more to do with opposition to foreign intervention and occupation than it did with cultural differences; the most ideologically religious Islamic countries such as Saudi Arabia supported the US and it is doubtful how far al-Qa'ida fighters were motivated primarily by religious fanaticism.

The chief US interrogator in Iraq, Major Mathew Alexander says that during 1,300 interrogations he supervised, he came across only one true ideologue. He is quoted as saying that: "I listened time and time again to foreign fighters, and Sunni Iraqis, state that the No 1 reason they had decided to pick up arms and join al-Qa'ida was the abuses at Abu Ghraib and the authorised torture and abuse at Guantanamo Bay."

This diagnosis by Major Alexander is confirmed by the history of Islamic fundamentalism across the Muslim world over the past 30 years.

It was the success of the Iranian revolution against the Shah in 1978/79 which began an era when political Islam was seen as a threat by the West, but Ayatollah Khomeini's appeal to Iranians always had a strong strain of nationalism and his exiling by the Shah in 1964 was because of his vocal opposition to extra-territorial rights for US military personnel in Iran.

The success of political Islam over secular nationalism in the Arab world has largely been because of the former's ability to resist the enemies of the community or the state.

All the military regimes espousing nationalism and secularism in the Arab world began or ended up turning into corrupt and brutal autocracies. In contrast, political Islam has been able to go some way towards delivering its promises of defending the community.

Secularism in the Arab world and in Afghanistan, on the other hand, has the problem that it is seen as being at the service of foreign intervention. Mr Obama's aim of ending the confrontation between the US and the Muslim world is both easier and more difficult than it looks.

It is easier because the confrontation is not primarily over religion or clashing cultures. But the confrontation is over real issues such as the fate of the Palestinians, the future of Iraq and the control of Afghanistan.

And even if Mr Obama wanted to change the US political relationship with Israel, it is not clear that he has any more political strength at home than George Bush had to do so. (© Independent News Service)