Lasting images from President Obama's tour
The images the President’s advisers hope will resonate most from his trip to Turkey are surely those from his tour of Istanbul’s Blue Mosque.
It was commissioned by an Ottoman Sultan, Ahmed 1st, who wanted to placate Allah almost 400 years ago. Now America’s President wants to do the same.
He still hasn’t given the major speech to Muslims his aides promised, but repairing relations with the Islamic world is why he came to Turkey on his first overseas tour.
That, and because it happens to be next door to Iraq, where he flew tonight, and the Turks have agreed to provide an exit route for American troops when they pull out.
The Turks opposed the Iraq war and badly fell out with Washington over it. So who better to make amends than the Senator-cum-President, who says the war should never have happened at all?
“I want you to know that I am personally committed to a new chapter in American engagement,” Obama told an audience of Turkish students. “We can’t afford to talk past one another and focus only on our differences, or to let the walls of mistrust go up around us.”
Almost 48 hours of playing mood music to the Turks appear to have taken their toll, though. At times Obama looked bored today. His question and answer session with students here had little of the sparkly bonhomie of his “town hall” meeting in Strasbourg last Friday.
Earlier the President toured Hagia Sophia, once one of Byzantine Christendom’s greatest churches, converted by the Ottoman conquerors into a mosque and now a museum.
Obama chewed gum throughout, just the average Chicago tourist. Now I like a bit of gum myself, but frankly the image of him chomping, broadcast live here, looked like the crass stereotype of America which Obama came here to dispel.
Still, the symbolism worked on so many levels; there the President was, standing at the crossroads of history, when he came across “Gli”, one of the museum’s cats, a rather mangy tabby which upon close examination appeared to be cross-eyed – rather like Turkey itself, which stands at the confluence of East and West.
The President couldn’t resist giving Gli a quick stroke and I couldn’t help thinking what a convergence of cultures Mr Obama is himself. His father a Kenyan Muslim, his childhood years spent in Indonesia, the biggest Muslim country in the world.
And this is what excites the culturally cross-eyed Turks. One student in Obama’s audience (he’s in my film tonight) couldn’t get over how amazing it was that he shared a name – Hussein – with that of the President of the United States.
Obama himself referred to his middle name this afternoon, clearly using his background to make overtures in a country still recovering from the George Bush years.
Obama said he thought Turkey should be part of Europe. That, of course, is none of his business. His main priority in coming here was surely to begin to reverse the tide of anti-Americanism that US foreign policy has produced across the Islamic world.
There’s a good cartoon on the front of this week’s Leman, a Turkish satirical magazine. It shows Obama in a turban pointing like Uncle Sam, and saying “I Want You”.
And the Turks I’ve met seem ready to be recruited by him. “We WANT to like him, he seems so different from past Presidents” one told me.
But it is stating the obvious to point out that, from Iraq to Gaza to Afghanistan, Obama will ultimately be judged by his deeds and not by his words. And if Obama can’t succeed in demolishing hatred of America here in officially secular Turkey, he is very unlikely to succeed anywhere else.
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