Hillary choice sends out wrong signals

Hillary Clinton is set to become the new United States Secretary of State. According to close aides of President-elect Barack Obama, the New York senator has accepted the offer, for which, almost everybody knows, she lobbied hard.

Hillary will become the third woman to fill the influential post. The position will allow her to influence world politics. For the Middle East, though, this is not really the best Obama could do.

For eight years, the Arabs and the Middle East peace process in particular, suffered from the undeterred US support to Israel. Even during the Israeli massacres in Lebanon in the 2006 war, the Bush administration refused to hear global cries for a ceasefire and gave Israel a green light to cripple the tiny neighbour with continuous bombing using the latest American arsenal of destruction.

During that war, Hillary Clinton came out very strongly in support of the Israelis and their "right to defend" themselves, despite the fact that Israel was the one launching the attacks, killing more than 1,000 Lebanese civilians. We are increasingly getting used to such American rhetoric, especially when it comes from politicians from New York - due to the strong pro-Israeli lobby in this part of the world.

It is hard to expect Hillary to change her mind so fast. But it is not reasonable to ask the new administration to bring in a new perspective in its approach to conflicts in this region.

And that would certainly be difficult if Hillary - a foreign policy amateur by all means, surrounds herself with pro-Israeli experts and anti-Arab lobbyists. It would be ironic to see that the neocons, who dominated Bush's Middle East policymaking, leave office only to be replaced by pro-Israel lobbyists. This region is so vital to the US, that Obama should be very careful to choose who will represent him and his country's interests in it.