Amir Tehari:

IN his “first message to the Muslim world” Tuesday, President Obama on Al-Arabiya TV invited the Is lamic Republic in Iran to “unclench its fist” and accept his offer of “un-conditional talks.”

Wait, didn’t Obama “revise” his first debate statement to say he’d insist on preconditions? Oops.

A few hours later, after Obama had appeared on the Saudi-owned satellite-TV channel, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad told a crowd of militants that no talks are possible unless the United States met a set of conditions.

He demanded a formal apology for unspecified US “crimes” against Iran and the Islamic world. The crucial condition, however, was that America should withdraw its troops from other countries, “taking them back to their own territory.”

The contrast couldn’t have been greater. Obama tried to be as conciliatory as possible – asking only for an “unclenching” of the Iranian fist – a change of style. Ahmadinejad asked for concrete US moves, notably a global military retreat that would leave the Middle East at Tehran’s mercy.

In the understatement of the year, Obama said: “Iran has acted in ways not conducive to peace and prosperity in the region.” He also claimed that Iran’s support for terrorists, though “not helpful,” is a thing of the past – yet Tehran was running guns to Hezbollah and Hamas even as he spoke.

ON Al-Arabiya, Obama did something more interest ing: He cast himself in the role of a bridge between America and the Muslim world, a kind of honest broker between two camps in conflict.

To hammer in the point, he recalled the Muslim part of his own family background and his childhood in Muslim Indonesia – a topic he’d carefully avoided during the campaign. He also asserted that America is a land of “Muslims, Christians, Jews” and others – making sure to mention Muslims first.

At times, Obama sounded like a marriage counselor. He said his job is to communicate to Americans that “the Muslim world is full of extraordinary people who simply want to live their lives and see their children live better lives.” On the other hand, he said, he’d also tell the Muslims that “Americans are not your enemy.”

Let’s see…we ended the genocide against Muslims in the Balkans.

We saved millions of Afghan Muslims from the tyranny of the Taliban (an ongoing project with little international support), we liberated Iraq from a dictator who murdered 400,000 Muslims. We saved thousands of Muslim lives in Pakistan and Indonesia after earthquakes and tsumanis.

We have so much to apologize for.

Obama looked to the past rather than the future to give such platitudes a tinge of political vision. He said he wanted a return “to the same respect and partnership that America had with the Muslim world as recently as 20 or 30 years ago.”

The problem is that few people in the Muslim world will welcome his back-to-the-future approach. Thirty years ago, Obama was a teenager in Indonesia. Vice President Joseph Biden, however, was already a senator and a champion of President Jimmy Carter’s strategic retreat.

What was happening during what Obama seems to regard as the “golden age” of Carter’s leadership? US diplomats were held hostage in Tehran and daily humiliated with mock executions. Soviet troops were annexing Afghanistan to the Evil Empire. Saddam Hussein was preparing to invade Iran, starting an eight-year war that claimed a million lives. Mecca was under siege by the ideological antecedents of Osama bin Laden. Syrian troops were preparing to march into Lebanon.

OTHER features of this “golden age”: the seizure of power by mullahs in Tehran, the assassination of Egyptian President Anwar Sadat, the coming to power of communists in the Horn of Africa, the military coup in Turkey, the first Islamist terror attacks in Algeria, unprecedented waves of repression in Egypt and Saudi Arabia and the imposition of military rule in Pakistan.

During the same period, and its immediate aftermath, dozens of Americans from many walks of life were seized as hostages and sometimes brutally murdered in several Muslim countries. The US ambassador in Sudan was murdered; the CIA station chief in Beirut abducted, taken to Tehran and killed under torture.