Obama's pen: Mightier than the last eight years' swords. (Brendan Smialowski/Getty Images)
In In his first full day in office eight years ago, President Bush woke up early, had coffee with his mother and father, and played White House tour guide for supporters. It was a Sunday, though the day before, his first official act after becoming president was ordering a halt to all new regulations. On Monday, the second day of his presidency, which happened to be the 28th anniversary of Roe v. Wade, the Supreme Court decision legalizing abortion, Bush ordered all federal aid denied to overseas groups that provide abortion counseling or perform abortions. It wouldn't be until the afternoon of January 30 (at 3:35 p.m.), ten days into his presidency, that Bush met with his National Security Council. The topic: "Mideast Policy."
Bush's one decision was about the Palestinian-Israeli conflict: "I think it's time to pull out of that situation," he said, according to Paul O'Neill, his treasury secretary, who was in attendance. The meeting was scripted for another purpose: to have CIA chieg George Tenet and Dick Cheney make the case for the possibility that Iraq's Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction, a case Tenet made with grainy satellite photographs and grainier intelligence, though they did the trick. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, Bush said, "should examine our military options." (The meeting is described in detail in Ron Suskind's The Price of Loyalty (Simon & Schuster, 2004), pages 70-75).
Move the scene, and history, up eight years. Barack Obama's first 24 hours were busy enough to fill (and replace) an entire season of the television series of the same name. He called the leaders of Israel and Palestine to signal that he would be personally involved in conflict resolution there, named George Mitchell, the former Maine senator and mediator, in the 1990s, of Ireland's cease-fire, his Mideast envoy, summoned his National Security team on his first full day and ordered the military to plan for a drawdown in Iraq, and signed six executive orders, among them the order to close the Guantanamo Bay prison within a year, close secret prisons immediately, extend Geneva Conventions protection to all prisoners, and forbid torture of any kind by any Americans in any American-run program. Ended, too, is the country's rendition program, the tactic, used since Bill Clinton's day, of sending prisoners to countries like Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Syria, where they could be tortured.
Though expected, the changes are radically refreshing. So are the priorities. it "will be the policy of my administration to actively and aggressively seek a lasting peace between Israel and the Palestinians as well as Israel and its Arab neighbors," Obama said on Wednesday. What he's essentially saying is that he'll be the first American president to succeed where every president before him has failed (Carter's mediation of the Israeli-Egyptian peace, initiated by Anwar Sadat anyway, aside). It's a lot to peg a region's hopes on. But what's the alternative? The last month in Gaza is what. And that's no alternative.
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