Obama Just As Bad As Bush

I remember the time when George W Bush moved out of the White House and Barack Obama was feted as the one who would backtrack on the carnage that Bush inflicted on the world and Americas reputation.
Guantanamo Bay would close, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan will end, the increasingly downtrodden Palestinians would be treated fairly and extraordinary rendition would cease. America would no longer be run by cowboys riding roughshod over smaller, weaker nations.
He was even the recipient of a Nobel Peace Prize largely in anticipation of the peace that he will be bringing but as we reach the halfway mark in his administration, he seems to have not only picked up where George W Bush left off, but taken it a few steps further.
Guantanamo is still operating, he has backed down on his demands for Israel to stop building on occupied Palestinian land and American boots are still on the ground in Iraq and Afghanistan while the torture and rendition policy has been continued.
So far, so his predecessors policies but in one area he has gone far beyond what even George W Bush achieved with his escalation of drone attacks inside Pakistan.
A damning statistic is that the current President authorized more drone strikes inside Pakistan in his first 9 months in office than George Bush did in his final 3 years in the White House.
If Bush had authorized this scale of attacks inside Pakistan, the human rights section of the population would rightly be screaming about the bombing of a sovereign country and the number of civilians killed.
A February 2010 report by the New America Foundation found that a third of the 1200 Afghans killed so far in drone attacks have been civilians. That's a horrendous amount of innocent deaths in a country counted as an ally and who has protested about the use of drones but it is hard to find a mention of Obama being a murderer or wanting him dragged before the Hague on crimes against humanity as was regularly on the protest banners directed at Bush.
America is not at war with Pakistan but Obama has not only picked up where George Bush left off, he has escalated it and is directly responsible for the decisions that have left over 400 innocent civilians dead in yet another country that has the misfortune to have terrorists hiding in it.
We hated Bush and rightly berated him for all his disastrous foreign policies and although Obama did not create the problems, he is continuing the same policies and adding his own murderous twist to them.
Obama promised change and hope but he has turned out to be George Bush mk 2 albeit with a better public image and we should be giving him as hard a time over his murderous foreign policy in Pakistan and his failure to adhere to human rights as we gave Bush.