Obama embraces Bush doctrine

It turns out that President George W. Bush won't have to wait to be vindicated by history. He's being vindicated in the here and now by, of all people, President Barack Obama.

Obama – the anti-war candidate of 2008 who vehemently attacked Bush's war policies and viciously used them to accuse Bush of everything from lying us into war to torture – has, since becoming president, adopted those very same policies. The Bush doctrine has become, for all intents and purposes, the Obama doctrine.

When Bush was president, the American military had a sizable presence in Iraq and Afghanistan. Now that Obama is president, we still do.

Bush had authorized predator drones to be used to target and wipe out terrorist leaders. They are the same drones that are being used to deadly effect to this day.

Under Bush, the military prison at Guantanamo Bay was in operation – as it still is today.

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Rendition was in practice. It still is.

And, of course, the Patriot Act was the law of the land in the Bush years. When Democrats took power and finally had their chance to end this "egregious violation of civil liberties," as they had been vilifying it for years, they decided instead to keep it in place. They agreed to extend the Patriot Act for another year.

To be sure, Obama has consistently shown that he really would like to satisfy his left-wing base and return to the insane anti-war policies he promoted in 2008. Only a year ago, after all, his administration announced it intended to give Sept. 11 architect Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and other terrorists civilian court trials in New York City – just a stone's throw from Ground Zero.

It would be hard to imagine a more foolish, destructive, suicidal and downright stupid way of handling these cold-blooded killers. So, of course, Obama was dead set on doing it, even in the face of the fierce public outcry that arose in response to his reversal of Bush's policy.

The backlash didn't seem to bother Obama. He had spent the entire 2008 campaign blasting Bush's policy of holding KSM and other terrorists indefinitely without trial as being "illegal." This despite the fact that detaining enemy combatants in wartime is completely consistent with the rule of law and despite the fact that Bush's war strategy of killing or capturing and detaining terrorists has proven to be spectacularly successful.

Many Americans still look at the manifold areas where we are vulnerable to attack and ask, "Why haven't there been more 9/11s?" Andrew McCarthy of National Review responds that it's no mystery: "Dead and detained jihadists cannot execute attacks. A terror network worried about drone strikes on its terror camps does not have the luxury of taking the months it takes to plan and execute significant plots. Fresh intelligence from high-level captives [obtained through interrogation, such as the waterboarding of KSM] disrupts plots in addition to making it extraordinarily difficult for al-Qaida to embed capable cells in our homeland."

Well, the Washington Post is now quoting administration sources in reporting that Obama has decided to detain KSM and other terrorists indefinitely without trial. That's right – however reluctantly, he has adopted another one of Bush's war policies.

This is taking place, it should be noted, as we are witnessing the bitter fruits of this disastrous policy decision. On Wednesday, a federal jury acquitted Ahmed Ghailani in civilian court of all but one of the 285 charges against him for his part in the 1998 U.S. embassy bombings which killed 224 people, dismissing overwhelming evidence of his involvement. So Obama's reported reversal comes not a moment too soon.

Oh, and as for Obama's arbitrary July 2011 deadline for withdrawing troops from Afghanistan? That's been scrubbed as well. It seems the midterm election succeeded at least in convincing Obama that unconditional surrender in the War on Terror is not an option. Not unless he and his party want to go the way of the Whigs.

So the date has been pushed back, this time to 2014 to ensure for a smooth transition. Even better yet, Michael Moore's head just exploded upon hearing the news.

Once again, Obama has been forced to admit the truth: Bush was right. Not that he would ever actually say so. But his actions – on troop deployments, continuing predator drone strikes, keeping Gitmo open, authorizing rendition, renewing the Patriot Act, calling off his plans for the civilian terror trials and premature withdrawal (surrender) – speak so much louder than words.

Tom Flannery writes for a newspaper in Pennsylvania. His opinion pieces have appeared in publications such as Newsday, the Los Angeles Times, MovieGuide and Christian Networks Journal. He has won eight Amy Awards from the Amy Foundation, including this year's first-place prize. He is a past recipient of the Eric Breindel Award for Outstanding Opinion Journalism from News Corp/The New York Post and has also won a Keystone Award from the Pennsylvania Newspapers Publishers Association. He is author of the book "1939: The Year in Movies," and an essay he wrote on Hollywood was included in the book "The Culture-Wise Family" by Dr. Ted Baehr and Pat Boone.