Let's try something new.

I'm waiting for Egypt. Until we've seen the elections and their results, the strategic situation in the Middle East is just a big question mark. Once the elections have been had, or we've seen a push or trend in delaying elections, then that will be the event that all of the players in the Middle East will have to respond to.

As of right now, we see the US' most important collaborators, the Saudis, very vigorously and energetically using their oil revenues to defend the US colonial structure that includes them, Saudi Arabia and as well as Jordan, Egypt (at least until elections), UAE, Kuwait and several others.

I consider it very unlikely that these efforts will bear results in their primary battleground, Syria because the regime has too big a home-territory advantage and because nobody in Syria seriously wants what the US, Israel and Saudi Arabia want, which is to turn Syria into 2005, 2006 Iraq and thereby render it unable to pose a threat or support threats to Israel.

Barack Obama said something that particularly annoyed me during his Middle East speech when he said colonialism has been over for a long time but some people still talk about it.

When exactly did colonialism end? Colonialism ended in Egypt when Nasser overthrew Egypt's stooge dictator who ruled on behalf of Great Britain. At the time stooge dictators in Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and Jordan were shifting their alliances to the United States - but their direct descendents are ruling as colonial stooges today. What does Obama think happened a long time ago?

I think the verdict on Barack Obama is that foreign policy has never been a subject that interested or concerned him. He didn't come into office knowing enough to change US policy and he did not change US policy, much to the disappointment of many people in the world. Barack Obama is a domestic-oriented US president, and his domestic considerations regarding the Middle East are the same as those of George W. Bush, another primarily domestic-oriented US president.

Nixon famously had a relatively foreign-policy orientation. George Bush I, and even Reagan, and even Clinton, compared to Bush and Obama, were interested in foreign policy itself enough to have either had before coming to office or formed in office original ideas about the US' direction.

Bush and Obama don't care enough to do more than follow the foreign policy personnel they either inherited or took on for domestic political reasons entirely unrelated to any foreign policy outlook.

But something new.

I think, just so I'll be writing something, I will try to write, at least one thought about information coming from one country a day. Monday will be Egypt; Tuesday, Palestine; Wednesday, Saudi Arabia; Thursday, Syria; Friday, Iraq; Saturday, Iran and Sunday for the countries not listed above.