When US President Barack Obama reached the White House, there were many hopes for change in the country's foreign policy: torture, war and imperial rhetoric were expected to become a thing of the past under George W Bush's successor. More than two years later, however, some think that changes have at best been limited to style.
With smoke still coming out of the mountain of rubble in Manhattan's Ground Zero on September 11, 2001, then-president Bush announced he was launching the hunt for the masterminds of the worst terrorist attack ever on US soil. Osama bin Laden was to be taken "dead or alive," Bush said six days after the attacks. Almost 10 years later, Obama had to make a more concrete decision over bin Laden's fate: he chose dead instead of alive.
With bin Laden's killing by US elite forces in Pakistan, Obama in a way gave closure to the 9/11 era. "Justice has been done," he said. However, human rights activists could hardly believe their ears: how could a trained legal expert and Nobel Peace Prize laureate give the green light for a man's execution without trial? Critics think they have an answer to this: Obama is leading the war on terrorism in many aspects even more ruthlessly than his predecessor.
"We now have Bush Plus," said Anthony Gregory, of the think tank Independent Institute. For Obama's Democratic Party, this sounds like an insult. It was after all the Republican Bush who started the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, who set up the detainee camp in Guantanamo, Cuba, to try suspected terrorists in special courts and who authorised torture in secret prisons.
His successor, the Democrats say, is now ending wars, holding out his hand to the Muslim world and speaking out for universal human rights. "Obama has restored America's standing in the world," says political strategist Robert Creamer. It remains true that White House rhetoric has changed. It is no longer Bush's "global war on terror" that appears to set the administration's security policy agenda, but rather a global task- sharing in defence against threats.
The Democrats cite as an example the military operation in Libya, in which Obama staunchly rejected having the United States play a leading role. There was no such multilateralism under Bush, they say. However, the Obama administration's quieter style is often at odds with the facts. It does ban torture, but it prevents prosecution of those involved in this "ugly chapter of American history," as the Washington Post recently put it.
The incumbent US government criticises the Guantanamo facility, but for all its promises is yet to close it. It talks a lot about human rights, but kills suspected terrorists without trial. Even US citizens like Yemeni hate-preacher Anwar al-Awlaki are beyond legal protection as soon as they land on the US wanted list. Obama is shadowing this declared public enemy with fighter drones and undercover military commandos, and he appears to be going a lot further than Bush in the effort.
In 2010 alone, the United States reportedly had their unmanned aircraft drop 118 bombs on suspects in Pakistan, according to the Washington-based New America Foundation (NAF). In 2008, the year before Obama took office, there were only 33 such attacks. Under the new commander-in-chief, such raids have claimed the lives of 1,700 people, 10 times as many as under Obama's predecessor, the NAF says. Moreover, innocent families are often the victims, with only 21 of those killed being actual militants, the foundation stresses.
Since the US regards them officially as part of its war on the terrorist network al Qaeda, the air raids are under little control by the US Congress, similar to the targeted killings by special forces. So Obama and the CIA under him can carry out their quiet wars with little supervision even in countries like Yemen and Somalia.
When historians assess US history after the attacks of September 11, 2001, they will have trouble telling the foreign policies of Bush and Obama apart from each other, according to Ross Douthat, a columnist for The New York Times. "For most Democrats, what was considered creeping fascism under Bush is just good old-fashioned common sense when the president has a 'D' beside his name," Douthat wrote. Actually, they appear to have little choice. "We have put al Qaeda on a path to defeat, and we will not relent until the job is done," their leader Obama has said clearly.
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