By Alistair Lyon, Special Correspondent – Analysis

BEIRUT (Reuters) – Barack Obama’s open-handed approach to the Middle East has won him praise from some Arab leaders viewed by previous U.S. presidents as deadly enemies.

“Obama is a flicker of hope amid the imperialist darkness,” Muammar Gaddafi told a rally of his supporters last week.

The Libyan leader, once a thorn in America’s side, was dubbed a “mad dog” by former President Ronald Reagan in the 1980s. He has mended ties with Washington since 2003.

“He (Obama) speaks logically. Arrogance no longer exists in the American approach which was previously based on dictating to the rest of the world to meet its own conditions,” Gaddafi said.

Obama has also earned conditional tributes from Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, Palestinian Hamas chief Khaled Meshaal and Lebanon’s Grand Ayatollah Sayyed Mohammed Hussein Fadlallah — all at times linked by Washington with terrorism.

Even non-Arab Iran’s President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has recognized that Obama might offer something new. “We speak with great respect for Obama. But we are realists. We want to see real change,” he told Germany’s Der Spiegel magazine. “We feel that Obama must now follow his words with actions.”

The readiness of America’s adversaries to acknowledge that Obama has brought a more sensitive verbal approach to the region is striking. In contrast, some traditional U.S. allies such as Egypt’s President Hosni Mubarak have kept tight-lipped.

Conservative Arab leaders may have misgivings about Obama’s overtures to their own regional rivals, Iran and Syria, and may fear that he will in time renew U.S. pressure for human rights and democratic reform in their own autocratic systems.

But for many in the Middle East, Obama’s search for dialogue with Iran, his declaration in Turkey this month that America was not at war with Islam, his stress on a two-state solution for Israelis and Palestinians, and his plans to withdraw from Iraq constitute a reassuring change from the perceived belligerence and pro-Israeli bias of his predecessor George W. Bush.

Now Arab leaders wonder whether Obama is able or willing to change the substance, not just the tone, of U.S. policy.

If so, some at least seem eager to do business with him.

“It is most natural to want a meeting with President Obama,” Assad told The New Yorker’s Seymour Hersh by email.

Assad, whose officials conducted Turkish-mediated peace talks with Israel last year, has long called for the United States to play a more active role in Middle East peace-making.

TEMPERED OPTIMISM

Despite such hopes, Syria remains cautious.

“We see what Obama said as positive,” Syrian Foreign Minister Walid al-Moualem said in an interview with Lebanon’s As-Safir newspaper last week. “But now we need to see how the United States will deal with the extreme right-wing Israeli government” led by new Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

Netanyahu has not endorsed a two-state solution. His foreign minister, Avigdor Lieberman, has openly rejected it, dismissing U.S.-backed peace talks with the Palestinians as a “dead end.”

Those talks have excluded Hamas, shunned by the United States, the European Union and the United Nations for its refusal to recognize Israel or renounce violence.

But Meshaal says the great powers will realize they need the Islamist group, which has ruled the Gaza Strip since routing its Fatah rivals in 2007, to resolve the Arab-Israeli conflict.

“Regarding an official opening toward Hamas, it’s just a matter of time,” he told Italy’s La Repubblica daily last month.

Meshaal, based in Damascus, hailed Obama’s “new language,” adding: “The challenge for everybody is for this to be the prelude for a genuine change in U.S. and European policies.”

The United States and its allies have feuded for years with Iran, Syria and the radical Islamist groups they assist such as Hamas and the Lebanese Shi’ite Hezbollah movement.

Fadlallah, a Shi’ite cleric who was close to Hezbollah in the 1980s, when kidnappers snatched many foreigners and suicide bombers struck U.S. troops and diplomats in Lebanon, praised Obama’s “human values” and his sincerity toward Islam.

“But the question that presents itself is whether President Obama can realize any of these slogans when faced by the institutions that govern America and over which the president does not have complete control,” he told Reuters last week.

Fadlallah welcomed Obama’s quest to repair relations with Iran, predicting that concerns of conservative Arab states about Iranian influence would fade if U.S.-Iranian ties improved.

Saudi Arabia and Egypt have both warned in recent months of Iran’s growing regional power, while simultaneously exploring accommodation with Tehran, rather than direct confrontation.

Saudi Foreign Minister Saud al-Faisal last week welcomed Washington’s “positive approach” of seeking a diplomatic way out of the Iranian nuclear crisis and urged Iran to reciprocate.

But Obama’s outreach to Tehran appears to have discomfited Egypt, a longstanding U.S. ally, an Egyptian analyst said.

“It makes some Arab governments, particularly Egypt, quite unhappy because they would have liked to be on the same side with the Americans in dealing with Iran,” said Mustapha al-Sayyid, political science professor at Cairo University.

(Additional reporting by Tom Perry and Laila Bassam in Beirut, Aziz Kaissouni in Cairo, and Lamine Ghanmi in Tripoli; Editing by Dominic Evans)