It's an auspicious day in the USA. Obama is, if nothing else, symbolic of change, and I wish him well. He's one of the few politicians in the world one might feel likely to pray for, as St Paul commands. So, along with the rest of the world apart from Iran, I hope for great things from him.
But there's an old Arab proverb, "Trust in God and tie up your camel," and that's about where I am. When I look at the way the world has changed in the last 8 years, I fear for this president in the same way that I would have feared for Kennedy if I'd been old enough.
Here are some of the elements of the perfect storm he has just walked into:
The best he can hope for is to regain a little of the moral high ground abandoned by the neo-cons in their bloody lust for empire. Bear in mind that they arranged the theft of two elections for the political Right. They represent the dark forces that our own queen here in the UK spoke about a few years back. And they haven't gone away - they're just lurking in the background, waiting to elect Hilary Clinton so the war can start all over again.
So my prediction is for one term for Obama, before he loses the nomination to Clinton and America goes off to war again. The bad guys have not yet finished, and all the US domestic legislation that was passed in the last few years was for a reason: wire-tapping, surveillance, habeas corpus, the whittling away of civil rights, the building of detention camps, the minting of a new currencey (the Amero), the North American military command, the establishment of power to declare martial law by the President, all of these things were done for a purpose as yet unfulfilled.
So I hope for the best and expect the worst, sad to say. God bless America, perhaps with a long period of repentance and humility, but let's hope that when America re-emerges as a moral leader, it will have been chastened. Roosevelt warned of the military-industrial complex - well, here it is, in all its failed, corrupted grandeur. Maybe it's time for the American people to throw off the shackles of their oppressors again, only not us Brits this time, but your own domestic ones.