Financial Times: Why Obama owes Bush an Apology

Critics in his own party and Republican opponents are attacking Barack Obama’s emerging stance on national security with equal ferocity. Many Democrats are furious that the president has broken his promise to abandon the Bush administration’s war-powers approach to fighting terrorism. Dick Cheney, the former vice-president, and other conservatives attack him for doing the opposite – for keeping his promise and emasculating the US anti-terror effort.

The left’s complaints make far more sense than Mr Cheney’s. Mr Obama is adjusting the Bush administration’s policies here and there and seeks to put them on a sounder legal footing. This recalibration is significant and wise, but it is by no means the entirely new approach that he led everybody to expect.

Mr Obama is in the right, in my view, but he owes his supporters an apology for misleading them. He also owes George W. Bush an apology for saying that the last administration’s thinking was an affront to US values, whereas his own policies would be entirely consonant with them. In office he has found that the issue is more complicated. If he was surprised, he should not have been.

The remainder of the article can be read here.

No apology needed.

Followed by a war crimes trial.

Bush I'm sorry you're a lying, moronic, war-profiteering, murderer.

President Obama can feel free to continue from there

felt were pretty black and white before taking office he now realizes are incredibly complex. I take the author's point on that.

However, this statement:

"The president has now decided that although the fight against terrorists might not be war as usual, it nonetheless calls for special powers and the infringement of certain liberties. In this he is surely correct. The attacks of September 11 2001 and subsequent terror plots show that the US is dealing with a tenacious and resourceful enemy, willing to kill as many innocents as its weapons allow, loosely organised around the world but organised nonetheless. This enemy is no ordinary criminal enterprise and suppressing it calls for extraordinary measures."

is just foolishness.

these problems and policies. Continuing any need for something, by a better rule of law and due process, is a result of BushCo doing everything the wrong way.

Clive Crook lost me back when he jumped on the oh-my-god-that-reverend-wright-is-totally-a-bigot bandwagon.

What happened to Clive Crook?

Clive used to be a reasonable guy; in his mind he probably still is a reasonable guy. But he has misunderstood what it means to be reasonable. He now apparently believes that it means declaring, in all circumstances, that Democrats and Republicans are equally in the wrong, even if the Democrats are talking Econ 101 and the Republicans are being led by the crazy 36.

And it means hysterical attacks on yours truly for actually taking sides in this debate, with the ostensible basis for the denunciation being a wonkish blog post — it says so in the title — in which I acknowledge that there is a potential short-run argument for protectionism, while making it clear that I’m not in favor of acting on that argument. He doesn’t actually take on my argument; he just insists that the only reason I might possibly have said anything like this is partisan bias, as opposed to an attempt to be intellectually honest.

Speaking of which, Clive and others have, in my view, a fundamentally flawed view of how to defend free trade. They believe that you should scream “Heresy! Sacrilege!” at anyone who even suggests that the world is more complicated than the simple Ricardian model of comparative advantage. But, you know, the world actually is more complicated than that simple model, and I believe that one’s case for free trade should be robust enough to stand up to a bit of free thinking — not sustained by excommunicating anyone who questions orthodoxy, even hypothetically.

He owes Bush and Cheney a jail cell.

policies they derided in 2004. The Bush policies in place at the end of his term were NOT the policies of the previous 6 years. Therefore, the "significant changes" this article notes having been made since he took office moved the already improved policy to match what Democrats, like Kerry, as well as Obama had advocated for years. The sharpest contrast is Bush's 2001-2004 policies versus Obama's - and that is REAL CHANGE.

As to owing supporters an apology - there is nothing Obama specifically said he would do or not do, where he is doing the opposite. Obama is converging to be where I expected him to be, with the exception that I thought he would allow a truth commission. (That though is not policy going forward.) In addition, he NEVER said he would. I was pleasantly surprised when he unambiguously said that the US will not torture - a statement he did not as starkly make while running.

As to owing Bush an apology - they must be kidding. This is just journalism whitewashing the past to make it tolerable. The fact is that Bush's actions have created any number of thorny, hard to resolve problems. In addition, he is responsible for the policies of his entire administration - not just the more moderate last 2 years. Where was the Financial Times in saying that Bush in 2006 needed to apologize for his and Cheney's attacks on Kerry, when he moved to both the law enforcement/intelligence approach to the war on terrorism and diplomacy in the Middle East and Near East that they mocked when Kerry proposed them. (Not to mention, the follow the money tools to help sort out international money laundering were from legislation Kerry wrote in the 1990s that passed after 911.)

Bush adopted a number of Obama's policies during the campaign. Obama was already amassing so much power he forced certain issues. Such as the timetable -- oh, 'xcuse me, framework or whatever they spun it -- for withdrawal from Iraq.

i can squawck over Obama's Afgan policy with the best of them, but one thing is very clear - Obama isn't going to operate his foreign policy with stop-loss recruitment of National Guard and other such treasons.

I agree with the above post re: Bush before 2006. They took the Dems up on these issues precisely so they could make these points: Obama=Bush. Bah, the mess is Bush's, he put the shit in the fan.

I missed that one. Otherwise, the author's claim that Obama is giving us something far different than what he campaigned on is ridiculous. And last time I checked, many of the prisoners at Gitmo were released and the policies for how to treat them have changed. More specifics and less generalized denunciations, please.