If the Democratic presidential candidate, Barack Obama, is seeking a messy status quo in Iraq, then that exit strategy for the United States is certainly within reach. Addressing the US ambassador in Iraq, Ryan Crocker, and the commander there, General David Petraeus, during a hearing before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Obama said: "If there's not huge outbreaks of violence, there's still corruption but the country [Iraq] is struggling along, but it's not a threat to its neighbors and it's not an Al-Qaeda base, that seems to me an achievable goal within a measured timeframe."

Obama's description of a post-America Iraq looked pretty much like post-1991 Iraq under Saddam Hussein: a country "struggling along" but that was no "threat to its neighbors" and was not "an Al-Qaeda base."

Obama's comments on Iraq also revealed his thinking about the war. Saddam was a brutal dictator, but why should Americans care? After eight years of George W. Bush in the White House, toppling dictators and spreading democracy to the world have become part of an evil scheme concocted by hawks in the Bush administration. And if the American people, tired of a costly Iraq war, want to reverse what happened there, then it's never too late. True, Saddam is dead, but the Arab world - including Iraq - is replete with dictators-in-the-making ready and waiting for an American nod to assume power. If a friendly dictatorship is what Americans are looking for in Iraq, that's not a problem.

If that's Obama's agenda, he will find eager ears in the Arab world. He might even restore America's pre-Bush image, if that's what he wants. But you have to wonder if this return to an amoral foreign policy is really what's best for American interests, and those of the world at large.

Since spreading democracy is apparently soon to be off the American agenda, there is no harm in instructing the US military in Iraq to employ brutal force to further stabilize Iraq. Obama might consider reviving the CIA's covert operations and restore the agency's dissolute practices of the 1950s and 1960s, which proved cost effective at the time. He might also come to understandings with dictators in the region who have been ruthlessly cracking down on opponents. During the Senate hearing, for example, Obama called for dialogue with Iran, without preconditions. Iran can have a brutal dictatorship, but, as Obama puts the argument, America is not in the business of holding the moral high ground.

Obama's notion that America is provoking disarray among nations is hardly a new one. However, although he is not responsible for causing the mess in Iraq, he should prepare to deal with it head on, not by reverting to an old "realist" template, but by finishing the job in

the proper way.

American foreign policy conduct in the past often turned the world against the US, making terrorists launch attacks against its interests around the world, and later on American soil. America was unloved long before George W. Bush came to power. Symbols of America were targeted during the Clinton administration. If Obama's "new-old" foreign policy is implemented in Iraq, then why not resort to it elsewhere? Why, for example, be engaged in a Palestinian-Israeli peace process? Why fear a nuclear Iran if Iran's missiles cannot reach American shores? Why care for a rigged election here or a detained human rights activist there? If every failed state can be turned into problem that does not spill over to other countries, especially to America, then let the tyrants rule.

Is Obama really planning to favor an amoral foreign policy? Or is he so inexperienced that he truly believes his worldview includes ideas that have never been tried before? As it stands, it seems that all Obama cares about is getting elected. That's understandable, but in order to do so he is willing to tell Americans what they want to hear. Yet what is popular in America is not necessarily right or good policy in the rest of the world.

Obama should reconsider his approach, which would effectively turn back the US foreign policy clock. If Bush and his team proved incompetent in spreading democracy in the Middle East, it does not mean that democracy is bad. It means that Bush failed and only figured out how to do things right by the time it was too late for his administration to make this count.

Hussain Abdul-Hussain is a journalist based in Washington. He wrote this commentary for THE DAILY STAR.