Barack who? Arabs weigh in.

Several copies of Barack Obama's "The Audacity of Hope" are prominently displayed in Jarir Bookstore here. They have not moved in weeks.

Browser Najla Khaled doesn't change that. Standing before the same shelf and lifting her full-face black veil to survey her choices, she grabs novelist Jeffrey Archer's latest release and walks away.

It's not that she dislikes presidential contender Obama. "I saw him on Tyra Banks's show and I think he has great opinions," says the 17-year-old high schooler. But his policies have not roused Najla, who's only heard "some random stuff ... here and there."

Senator Obama's campaign may have launched groundswells of hope, ardor, and optimism at home and in Europe. But at the start of his closely watched trip to the Middle East, the all-but-certain Democratic nominee is little known in the Arab world, and has yet to generate widespread interest or enthusiasm.

From Baghdad to Beirut, people said in recent interviews that they are unfamiliar with his policies, except for his plan to move quickly to pull US troops out of Iraq.

In general, they said they prefer Obama over the likely Republican nominee, Sen. John McCain (R) of Arizona, whom they view as unsympathetic to Arabs.

But even those who like Obama's personality are not expecting him to initiate major turnabouts on US Middle East policies, particularly on the most contentious one of all, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

"The only way that Obama will be better for us is that he will try to suck the life out of the Arabs through diplomacy, while Bush tried to do it through war," says Fathy Tantawy as he inspects a small carburetor on the table next to his tea cup in a Cairo cafe.

"When they look at the Middle East they all have the same thoughts, whether it's Obama or Clinton's wife or Bush or … who is that other guy on TV?" He pauses to think. "Oh yeah, McCain."

A vast and volatile region, the Middle East stretches from Atlantic-washed Casablanca to hill-encircled Tehran. It is home to 340 million Arabs, 65 million Iranians, and almost 6 million Jews in Israel.

The region is vital to US interests as the main source of the world's oil. It also is the birthplace of Islam and the hottest battleground in the global struggle between Muslim moderates and extremists.

Obdurately resistant to democratization, the area also contains some of the world's most vexing problems: Iran's nuclear-enrichment program, an unstable Iraq, a fractured Lebanon, and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

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