In black and white

 

 

With near thunderbolt pace, American President Barack Obama has transformed the line of US foreign policy less than a week after taking oath to the office by making apparent that the US’s aspirations and objectives will be in accordance with American ideals and the rule of law. Saying “we have no time to lose”, Obama summarised in a curt reply how pressing he deems it is to bolster American international relations and to graph a new line in foreign relations.

In the first two full days, the new government has set swiftness for taking action that was unheard and unseen in Bush’s administration. Giving orders from the White House and State Department headquarters alternatively, Obama pronounced the shutting down of the Guantanamo Bay confinement centre in Cuba, discontinuation of ruthless grilling manners by intelligence officers, halting of armed forces courts for alleged terrorists at Guantanamo for at least four months, ending of covert prisons upheld by the intelligence community overseas, and the selection of two extraordinary diplomatic envoys to deal with sensitive issues of Arab-Israeli amity and Afghanistan and Pakistan.

However, some experts believe that the Guantanamo step has been taken in a bit of haste. Reacting on the decision, Michael Scheuer, a previous CIA agent and an old hand on Al-Qaeda told TSI: “It is pretty unclear what will happen to the detainees. I don't make out where they would be taken. We have two choices with us. We can gun them down in the combat zone or treat them as POWs and discharge them when the conflict is over; so possibly never.”

Meanwhile, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton declared that ex-Senator George Mitchell would join Obama bandwagon as a special envoy for Middle-East peace, particularly resolution of Arab-Israeli issues. Mitchell, in the past, had led the peace initiative in Northern Ireland. She also named former US Ambassador Richard Holbrooke, who negotiated the Dayton Accords to end Balkan Wars, as special envoy to Afghanistan and Pakistan. The choice of Mitchell conveys an obvious pointer that the US will be back as an honest negotiator and will drift away from being Israel's lawyer, which Bush administration was. While, time and again, Obama has confirmed US's support to Israel, he's also indicated that he will refrain from towing the Likud's point of view on the issue. In one of his speeches, he expressed surprise and irony that while statesmen in Israel were open to disscussions, their supporters in the US took a very narrow view of the things.