As such, I find it difficult to defend.
http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2013/apr/24/bush-policies-still-alive-in-obama-white-house/?page=all
President Obama came into office promising to be the opposite of George W. Bush, but after nearly five years as commander in chief, his policies are more like his Republican predecessor than he would care to acknowledge.
From drone strikes in foreign countries to the troop surge in Afghanistan to drawing up legal justification for killing U.S. citizens abroad, Mr. Obama’s administration has embraced and even expanded on some of Mr. Bush’s more controversial programs.
SEE ALSO: Interactive Bush museum will highlight 8 years of the era of ‘W’
“The policies that have produced successes in the foreign arena have been policies where he has stuck the closest to the Bush legacy,” said Peter Feaver, who was a national security aide to Presidents George W. Bush and Bill Clinton.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/04/24/obama-george-bush_n_3145804.html
"The basic similarity is these are the only two presidents that have governed in a post-9/11 era, where the principal threat to the United States comes from terrorism," said Ben Rhodes, Obama's deputy national security adviser. "President Obama believes that we're at war with al-Qaida and its affiliated groups, has continued to take direct action against al-Qaida networks overseas and has continued to pursue very aggressive intelligence, law enforcement and homeland security measures that have been developed since 9/11."Jack Goldsmith, who was an assistant attorney general in the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel during Bush's first term, says Obama's use of warrantless surveillance, military detentions without trial and increased drone strikes has received less pushback than it would under a Republican president.
Goldsmith, now a law professor at Harvard Law School, argued in a blog post after Obama's election that the public "generally trust the former constitutional law professor and civil liberties champion more than a Republican president to carry out these policies."
He added that "many on the left (in Congress and the NGO community, and perhaps the press) who might otherwise be uncomfortable with these policies will give President Obama a freer hand than they would a Republican president."
http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2010/09/03/how_different_is_obama_from_bush_on_terrorism
By overreaching in its claims of executive power, the Bush administration found itself repeatedly rebuffed by the Supreme Court. Each of these reversals had foreign-policy consequences because each made the Bush administration look like a habitual rule-breaker in both the domestic and foreign spheres. Ending the confrontation between the executive branch and the Supreme Court over executive power at least removed a recurring, public set of embarrassments, even if it had little other purpose internationally.
At the same time, however, Obama's team has preserved, whether by necessity or choice, many of the controversial programs that brought criticism to Bush. Obama ordered so-called "black sites" closed, but it is difficult for anyone without access to highly classified information to know how much has actually changed about how the intelligence services capture and detain suspected terrorists. The Guantánamo military commissions are beginning again. Some large number of the nearly 200 remaining detainees will not be tried. They will continue to be held as, essentially, prisoners of war, until hostilities between the United States and al Qaeda end -- an uncertain, open-ended time frame that many critics consider inadequate. Secret surveillance has not ended, though it is now expressly authorized by Congress.
http://sites.middlebury.edu/presidentialpower/2011/12/12/why-obama-continues-bushs-foreign-policy/
Against the backdrop of today’s joint Obama-al Maliki press conference it is worth noting that perhaps the strongest portion of Obama’s presidential record so far has been his handling of foreign policy. Public opinion polls give the President much higher marks for his conduct of foreign policy than of domestic issues, and some of his most notable policy successes – killing Bin Laden, overthrowing Gadhafi – have taken place abroad. The irony, of course, is that Obama’s success in this policy realm has come largely by building on the foundation laid down by his predecessor George W. Bush rather than dismantling it. And when Obama has sought to deviate from the path charted by Bush, more often than not he’s been unsuccessful. Continuity, then, and not change, has been the byword of Obama’s foreign policy.
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