One year on it’s all talk, talk, talk... (From The Northern Echo)

One year on it’s all talk, talk, talk...

10:44am Tuesday 19th January 2010 in

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AT his inauguration a year ago, President Barack Obama was hailed as a messiah, a great saviour who would come to set America and the wider world at ease with itself again after all the damage done by George W Bush.

Understandably, the American people were exhausted by bad news and no substantial military or political progress in Iran or Iraq.

Many were ashamed when they heard reports of inhumanity at the detention camp at Guantanamo Bay.

President Obama declared he would end all that negative talk about “the war on terror”

and spoke instead of “engagement” with the Muslim world. He was determined, though, to make sure Iran did not develop nuclear weapons. On the home front he pledged public health care for all American citizens.

One year on, this climate of great expectations has turned frosty. He promised to close Guantanamo “within my first year”. That has gone and it is still there.

His policy of engagement with the Muslim world shows no progress either. And he has proved himself weak and indecisive against terrorism – his reaction to the would-be suicide plane bomber over Detroit has proved confusing and counterproductive.

President Obama has been promising to take decisive action to prevent Iran from producing nuclear weapons. He has made countless speeches about this. His policy towards Pakistan is so incoherent he risks handing that failing state, and its atomic armoury, into the control of the Taliban.

Oh yes, how this new president likes making speeches. He is good at it. But deadlines and ultimatums have all produced no result.

He promised “a course of very tough sanctions against the Iranian regime”. But he has not been able to secure agreement for even the weakest sanctions programme.

His health care plans have had to be watered down to ensure they get through Congress and it is now revealed that, far from being a focus for social and political harmony in the US, these health plans have disgruntled 45 per cent of the electorate.

There was the farce of his winning the Nobel Prize for Peace, without his achieving any success in this area – despite many fine speeches about peace. This love for the sound of his own voice was in evidence last week when he made not one, but two speeches about what he was going to do to help Haiti.

Far better, Mr President, to say little and let your deeds speak for you. And to receive praise when it has actually been earned and not, as it were, while it is still on tick.

Speaking of tick, President Obama’s government threatens to deliver us into a second global economic crisis because it has printed more money during the past 18 months than over the previous hundred years. There will have to be a reckoning, very likely taking the form of ruinously high inflation – not just in the US, but here as well.

He has shown a curious ineptitude in Iran by ordering a smaller military surge than that sought by his commanders while at the same time, incredibly, giving the Taliban the date for the start of his planned withdrawal.

From the start I wished President Obama well. I still do, but my hopes are fading. He is no messiah after all, but something like that pathetic peanut farmer Jimmy Carter, and something like the equally talkative, but ultimately vacillating Bill Clinton.

■ Peter Mullen is Rector of St Michael’s, Cornhill, in the City of London, and Chaplain to the Stock Exchange.