IF ANYONE had any doubt that Barack Obama would fail to follow up words with action, the new President of the United States put those fears to rest as he hit the ground running in a whirlwind first day at the White House.
Building on his campaign promises, his inauguration speech on Tuesday carried a strong message on America’s way ahead in its dealings with a world that for the past eight years has looked for leadership and instead found itself faced with aggressive unilateralism.
In a barely veiled indictment of the Bush years, Obama rejected “as false the choice between our safety and our ideals,” adding, “we will not give up [our ideals] for expedience’s sake.” America, he said, was “ready to lead once more”.
Again marking his difference from the neocon days of Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld, he underlined that earlier generations had “understood that our power alone cannot protect us, nor does it entitle us to do as we please. Instead, they knew that our power grows through its prudent use; our security emanates from the justness of our cause, the force of our example, the tempering qualities of humility and restraint.”
And it was not just rhetoric. On his first day in office, he drafted an order for the closure of the Guantanamo Bay prison within a year. The camp, site of torture and other abuses, came to define the Bush administration. In two other executive orders, he is to ban torture by all US personnel and initiate a review of the cases of all those still held at Guantanamo, having already ordered judges there to suspend all trials currently under way.
From the first, Obama was also on the phone to all the major actors in the Middle East, suggesting that a resolution of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict will be a top priority rather than the end of term afterthought it was for his predecessors, while a foreign policy statement posted on the White House website said Obama was prepared for direct negotiations with Iran, “without preconditions”.
America under George W Bush had come to be perceived across the world almost as a ‘rogue state’, throwing around its overwhelming military might with little regard for consequences, and caring little about its relations with the rest of the world – friend or foe. Issues like Guantanamo or torture may be seen as ‘easy’ policy decisions, but their symbolism is huge. They constitute an admission that America had strayed from the principles it claimed to defend, and such a clear statement of intent, together with the promise of multilateralism, puts America back at the heart of the democratic world.
In themselves, such gestures will not eliminate the terrorist threat or solve the Middle East conundrum, but they will hugely strengthen America’s hand in gathering support for its positions, isolating the extremists by taking away the ammunition that fell like manna from Heaven in the unlamented days of President Bush.
