An Oldie But A Goodie

Here's a re-post of a blog post I did back on August 11, 2007:

Everyone who has talked politics with me over the last couple of weeks knows how pissed off I've been over the fact that Hillary, Dodd, Biden, Romney, and others have been attacking Obama for saying this:

As President, I would make the hundreds of millions of dollars in U.S. military aid to Pakistan conditional, and I would make our conditions clear: Pakistan must make substantial progress in closing down the training camps, evicting foreign fighters, and preventing the Taliban from using Pakistan as a staging area for attacks in Afghanistan.

I understand that President Musharraf has his own challenges. But let me make this clear. There are terrorists holed up in those mountains who murdered 3,000 Americans. They are plotting to strike again. It was a terrible mistake to fail to act when we had a chance to take out an al Qaeda leadership meeting in 2005. If we have actionable intelligence about high-value terrorist targets and President Musharraf won't act, we will.

Obama's statement made a lot of sense to me, particularly given that BushCo has, over the last several years, attempted to minimize Pakistan's involvement in 9/11 while at the same time falsely claiming that Saddam was somehow involved in those attacks. But Obama was instantly attacked by Hillary and others as "naive" for saying those things about Pakistan. Mitt Romney even compared Obama to "Dr. Strangelove."

So let me see if I've got this straight: Someone finally attempts to introduce some common sense into America's counter-terrorism policy, and he gets attacked for it by both Democrats and Republicans. Why?

Well, Josh Marshall figured it out:

All Obama said was that if we have actionable intelligence about the whereabouts of high-value al Qaeda targets in Pakistan, and Pakistan won't act, we will act.

Clearly, no Republican can quibble with this. They're on the record for invading countries because they might become dangers to us at some point in the future. They're hardly in a position to disagree with Obama if he says we'll hunt down people who committed mass casualty terror attacks within our borders. And I'm not sure Democrats are in much of a position to do so either.

The unspoken truth here, I suspect, is that Obama has struck on the central folly of our post-9/11 counter-terrorism defense policy -- strike hard where they aren't and go easy where they are. I think everyone can see this. But Obama got there first. So they need to attack him for saying it.

I am certainly glad to see that Obama isn't backing down from his statements. I liked what he said at the debate the other night about how Hillary and some of the other candidates who are attacking him on this had actually voted to give Bush the authority to launch "the biggest foreign policy disaster in our generation."

That was a good start, but he needs to stay on the offensive on this. Hillary's vote to authorize the Iraq War was, in my opinion, one of the greatest acts of political cowardice in recent memory, and voters need to be constantly reminded of this.