Post-Iraq, Obama still faces challenge of Mideast peace

WASHINGTON — Firmly and finally ending the U.S. combat mission in Iraq, President Obama will have but a moment before trying to hasten peace nearby between Israelis and Palestinians.

Left unclear is whether winding down the war that inflamed Arab passions will do anything to help longshot Mideast talks.

From the Oval Office, a setting designed to command gravity and attention, Obama will declare Tuesday night that Iraqis are now the ones in charge of a war he had opposed. Within hours Wednesday, he will be immersed in talks with Israeli and Palestinian leaders, underscoring the hopeful but precarious U.S. role as a middleman.

The White House is framing the two events as commitments kept by the president. But there is little excitement buzz and certainly no bold promises that capping the combat mission in Iraq will prod broader peace in the Middle East.

White House officials said the speech, scheduled to begin at 5 p.m. PDT and to last 15 to 20 minutes, would acknowledge this week's deadline as a "milestone" and pay tribute to the 1.5 million Americans who have served in Iraq since 2003.

Obama will address shifting U.S. options now that the country is no longer technically at war in Iraq, including a greater emphasis on Afghanistan and Pakistan — and the domestic economy.

Obama has given just one other Oval Office speech, on the BP oil spill. That he is doing it there, rather than from a military base or the Rose Garden, illustrates the significance the White House attaches to the issue.

Obama will say that "it's time for Iraq to step up and take responsibility for security in the country," one senior administration official said, and that "it's time to rebalance our resources when it comes to national security and our economy."

Obama will call former President George W. Bush before the speech, White House press secretary Robert Gibbs said. He did not say whether Obama will give his predecessor credit for the 2007 troop buildup as Republicans have demanded.

In a narrow sense, the peace talks convened by the White House have little to do with Iraq. The Middle East stalemate has to do with the borders of a potential Palestinian state, the fate of Palestinian refugees, the status of Jerusalem, the security of Israel — and trust on both sides.

Making progress on those points, not the Iraq war, is at the core of renewed talks between Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas.

Writ large, however, the fate of Iraq is indeed tied to prospects for peace for its neighbors in the region.

"There is no direct connection between the two issues, but I think together they tell the same story: the limits of U.S. power," said Marina Ottaway, director of the Middle East Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. "The U.S. can only go so far, and then it's in the hands of the regional actors."

Much depends on whether Iraq's leaders can form a lasting government, whether Iran will seek to exert added influence with a smaller U.S. presence in Iraq, and whether the United States will be perceived as the country that responsibly turned power back to Iraq or the one that left before the job was done.

"The more that Iraq emerges as a stable state after the Americans withdraw, the greater the chance for progress in the Middle East, the more it creates a stable environment for the peace process to move forward," said Robert Danin, an expert on Israeli-Palestinian affairs and senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. "To the extent that there's bloodshed and instability in Iraq, that makes it harder for people to focus on peacemaking."

For now, a presidential speech about the changing of the U.S. mission in Iraq is as close to closure as the people of the United States will get.

All troops will not come home until the end of 2011 at the latest. The United States will still keep tens of thousands in a dangerous Iraq for support and counterterrorism missions in the meantime. More Americans are likely to die. As Obama has said: "We have not seen the end of American sacrifice in Iraq."

But Obama has been resolute in his pledge to withdraw all troops by the end of 2011, as arranged for by the Status of Forces Agreement signed by Bush. "By the end of next year, all of our troops will be home," the president said in his most recent weekly address.

Most of the more than 4,400 U.S. military members who have died in the Iraq war have been killed since May 2003 — after Bush declared the major combat operations over from the deck of a warship. His backdrop then was a now infamous banner that declared "mission accomplished."

"You won't hear those words coming from us," Gibbs said Monday.

The United States, too, is still absorbed with the widening war in Afghanistan, the base for the al-Qaida terrorists responsible for the Sept. 11 attacks. That conflict began in 2001, even before the Iraq war.

Obama's stand is that the Iraq war, at a costly price, distracted from the cause in Afghanistan.

"That's where 9/11 was planned," Gibbs said. "This is not an Afghanistan speech, but he will mention that."

Obama is giving the combat troop withdrawal from Iraq a big spotlight.

He dispatched Vice President Joseph Biden to Iraq on Monday to mark the moment and to push Iraqi leaders for resolution of their political divisions. On Tuesday, he will fly to sprawling Fort Bliss in Texas, home of tens of thousands of service members who fought in the Iraq war.

And then he will give just his second prime-time address from the Oval Office.

The Iraq war once filled the streets of some American cities with protest and, over time, generated much resentment in the Arab world.

A lot of the heat at home has subsided, partly in response to an improving situation in Iraq that was aided when Bush ordered in more troops in 2007.

Obama declared the war wrong and said he would end it, a mission a U.S. president actually could accomplish. He also promised to be deeply engaged in working for Middle East peace. His name is now prominently associated with that latter, more difficult goal.