Possibly the most biggest mea culpa in Presidential history, Bill Clinton, newly appointed as UN Special Envoy for Haiti, admitted to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee that the US policy of compelling poor developing countries to buy US agricultural products at subsidized prices was a mistake.
It destroyed local agricultural sector and was a disaster in Haiti.
I did that. I have to live every day with the consequences of the lost capacity to produce a rice crop in Haiti to feed those people, because of what I did. Nobody else.
Although Clinton helped lay the groundwork for the demilitarization of America's political and economic systems through his uncritical embrace of neo-liberalism, he eventually slipped into neo-conservatism and war.
This was after the Republicans retook the House after two years of his presidency, a dilemma that Obama is also facing.
Obama is heading in the same direction which will alienate the millions of Americans who voted for him hoping he wouldn't fall into the same conservative tar pit that Bill Clinton waded into.
Actually the differences between US neo-liberalism or neo-progressivism and neo-conservatism isn't that much different as the poliical parties might suggest..
Neo-conservatism is often synonymous with neo-fascism. This is the belief that the government world should be beholden to the corporate world.
Neo-fascists also heavily rely on the Armed Forces to police the world. Progressives want the government to take control of the country's destiny and avoid using military force except when absolutely necessary.
Few progressive oppose free enterprise except when free enterprise tries to take control of the US government which occurs when a GOP president is elected.
Progressive also want economic balance restored to the middle class, not the 'have mores' base of the GOP.
Politics of insanity?
The warning signs that President Obama's slide into conservatism were clear from the beginning. Like when the newly minted President chose for his senior economic advisor's men like Lawrence Summer, Clinton's one time Treasury Secretary, who were responsible for the policies that besides destroying Haiti's rice crop.
Sumner also enabled a million and one corporate get rich schemes such as the sub-prime mortgage bonanza whose collapse has left the country in its current disastrous condition.
Another clue was surely the fact that Obama's defense spending from the start outstripped his Republican predecessor's.
This was after his campaign reached national prominence precisely with his pledge to end the war in Iraq, which should logically have meant a major reduction in the military budget.
Obama's views on Afghanistan are clearly hawkish and the firing or General McChrystal could have given him the cover the pull the plug on the other middle eastern war.
Indeed, can one consider spending upwards of a trillion dollars a year on defense. This spending if redirected could cure most of America's economic and social woes. Cuts in US defense spending would also make the world a safer place.
The false choice of human rights vs. national security
Instead, President Obama has essentially continued almost every major Bush security policy. there are still state secrets, targeted killings, renditions and indefinite detention, opposing the right of habeas corpus, preventing victims of admitted torture from seeking judicial redress, expanding the Afghan war. All these must surely be making Bush, and especially Cheney, happy and wealthier men.
As Michael Hayden, Bush's last CIA Director, put it in a recent interview, "Obama has been as aggressive as Bush" in defending executive prerogatives and powers that have enabled and sustained the ‘war on terror.’
In the first, a federal appeals court overturned a lower court decision allowing former CIA prisoners to sue companies that participated in their rendition and torture in overseas prisons.
In deciding that the plaintiffs could not sue despite an ample public (rather than classified) record supporting their claims, Judge Raymond C. Fisher supported the Obama Administration's contention that, in his words, sometimes there is a "painful conflict between human rights and national security" in which the former must be sacrificed to preserve the latter.
Sound familiar doesn't it? We heard this many times during the Bush presidency when Arabs were being tortured at Abu Ghraib.
What neither Attorney General Eric Holder nor the President seems to understand is that there can be no contradiction between human rights and national security. The absence of human rights can never but lead to a lack of security.
One country's "national" security (especially that of the global "hyper-power," the United States) cannot be defined apart from and in contrast to the security of other nations.
A complete rebuttal of US war justifications
Even more troubling was the release last week of two reports from bi and non-partisan study groups regarding the best possible course forward in Afghanistan.
The reports, "A New Way Forward: Rethinking US Strategy in Afghanistan," published by Washington-based Afghan Study Group, and the "Strategic Survey 2010," released by the London-based International Institute for Strategic Studies.
Both conclude that "a Taliban takeover is unlikely even if Washington reduces its military commitment" in Afghanistan, in good measure because the conditions that allowed the first Taliban takeover in the 1990s no longer exist and can't easily be repeated.
As important, "there [are] no significant Al Qaeda presence in Afghanistan today, and the risk of a new 'safe haven' there under more 'friendly' Taliban rule is overstated."
In addition, prior to Bush administration, the US paid the Taliban $50 million a year to keep the Afghan poppy crop under control.
The so-called 'Northern Alliance that Bush put back into control of Afghanistan were the old Afghan poppy growers.
The rationale for continuing the war in Afghanistan is not consistent with the facts in the two studies.
President Obama is by all accounts a decent man who unlike his predecessor does not enjoy leading his country in war time.
His political future and legacy depend in large part on successfully navigating the United States away from a war economy and towards rebuilding it along more innovative and sustainable lines.
Yet he is deepening the War in Afghanistan which may become a disastrous folly.
Obama will likely produce the outcome the policies were supposed to avoid: a greater hatred and violence against the United States in the heart of Central Asia, and from there, across the Muslim world.
Rightardia also notes that the Obama middle eastern peace initiative with Israel and Palestine was failure as predicted.
The talks and Washington and an Egyptian resort failed because Hamas, which is the political party that is in power in Palestine, was excluded form the talks.
All Hamas had to do was fire a few rockets and mortar shells into Israel to scuttle the talks. Obama needs to avoid future 'fools errands in the middle east.
Mark LeVine is a professor of history at University of California, Irvine . His most recent books are Heavy Metal Islam (Random House) and Impossible Peace: Israel/Palestine Since 1989 (Zed Books).
The views expressed in this article are the author's own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera's editorial policy.
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