Obama's Bad Year on Human Rights

A year in to his historic presidency, what has Barack Obama’s turbulent first 12 months achieved?

Leaving aside the headline issues of heath-care reform and fiscal bailouts - not my subject here - how has the “change” president actually performed in areas that were touchstones during his election campaign - Guantánamo Bay and the “war on terror”, Afghanistan and Iraq, relations with the wider world?

Well, it’s been significantly different to the Bush administration in each field. Obama’s second-day-in-office announcement that Guantánamo would close within a year was roundly welcomed. There were also commitments to end torture and the corrosive and meaningless phrase “war on terror” was dropped, both in Washington and London. Troop scale-down in Iraq was, so to speak, offset by the surge for Afghanistan, but we were assured that capacity-building measures for the Afghan security forces was the long-term goal. And, to great acclaim, Obama gave a speech in Cairo on US relations with the Muslim world that seemed to lay to rest the spectre of an America at war with Islam.