Some change doesn't come easy.
President Obama pledged during the 2008 campaign to fix the "failed policies" of the "disastrous" Bush administration. But in his first 100 days in the White House he has not fully thrown off the mantle of his predecessor -- nor shown him to be a failure, foreign policy experts say.
Obama has clashed with George W. Bush on many of the issues that defined the 43rd president's tenure: on commitments in Iraq, engaging with Iran and other enemies, on the harsh interrogation of suspected terrorists.
From his first days in office, Obama set about undoing the architecture of Bush's War on Terror -- objecting to his overarching approach to fighting Islamist terrorism and even to the phrase "War on Terror" itself, which has been shunned by the new administration.
But few of those changes have had a visible effect three months in: the naval prison at Guantanamo Bay was ordered closed yet remains open as Obama plans where to send its inmates; the president has yet to establish a coherent policy on Iran -- following in the Bush administration's frustrated footsteps; and while American troops are being removed from Iraq, most will stay in place until 2010.
Gary Schmitt, director of advanced strategic studies at the American Enterprise Institute, said the 2007 surge of troops in Iraq and the employment of counterinsurgency tactics there made room for a safer withdrawal from the country. "The very fact that he can pull troops out of Iraq and do so in the timeline that he's talked about is evidence of Bush's policy success there," he said. - FOX News Story
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