Obama's Speech

Barack Obama gave a major foreign policy address today. I've read the transcript, and, on the whole, I think it was excellent. Unfortunately, one particular passage of the speech is overshadowing the rest. At one point, Obama said:

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.

Now putting aside the merits of this position for a moment, I find the reaction of right-wing bloggers and pundits to this proposal to be almost too hypocritical for words. The near universal reaction was to criticize Obama's plan (and even his speech itself) as reckless. Yes, suddenly folks like Michelle Malkin, Ed Morrissey, and John Podhoretz are nuanced realists who worry about the potentially negative consequences not only of military action, but tough rhetoric as well.

But these are the very same people who were the loudest supporters of Bush's unimaginably reckless decision to invade Iraq (which predictably destabilized the region, bogged down our armed forces indefinitely, and empowered Iran). They cheer loudly whenever any Republican says something "tough," and scoff at those who worry about unnecessarily antagonizing the world. And many of them are on record as favoring a military strike against Iran, an act that would almost surely set off a cascade of disastrous consequences. But when someone suggests that we might want to go after the very people who attacked us on 9/11 and are currently regrouping and planning further attacks in relative safety, that person is branded as a very unserious, reckless neophyte.

Captain Ed comments: "One would hope that this would mark the end of Barack Obama's credibility as a presidential candidate." Yes, indeed, it is much more credible to lump all Muslims into one undifferentiated mass and proclaim that we should "double Gitmo"--a la Mitt Romney--or to hyperventilate and scream at people while offering only meaningless slogans like "stay on the offense"--a la Rudy Giuliani. They are very serious, credible people. Not like Obama.

And it wouldn't be a right-wing attack without some blatant straw man argumentation, so Malkin, Morrisey and others all make it sound as if Obama is in favor of declaring war against Pakistan and invading the country, rather than sending a special-ops team or a cruise missile to Waziristan (and even then only *if* we have actionable intelligence regarding the location of top al Qaeda leaders)--a plan that the Bush administration itself came very close to pulling the trigger on in 2005.

Moreover, we all know that if these very same words had been uttered by George Bush or Dick Cheney or Rudy Giuliani, that virtually every one of these conservative pundits would be screaming "Hell yeah!" and accusing everyone else of "not getting it."

That said, criticism of Obama's position isn't confined to the reflexively partisan Right. Jerome Armstrong and others on the Left were also highly critical of Obama. Armstrong writes:

[T]his is basically a continuation of the Bush-Cheney doctrine of endorsing unilateral pre-emptive military attacks abroad, lighter perhaps, but certainly not the mentality that would pull us out of the mideast quagmire.

I'm not sure I follow. First, I don't think either "unilateral" or "pre-emptive" is a particularly appropriate adjective here. Obama was suggesting taking out al Qaeda leaders like Zawahiri and Bin Laden, the very people who orchestrated the 9/11 attacks. That's responsive, not pre-emptive. Second, all surgical strikes are, by their nature, unilateral. You don't create a coalition of countries to fire a cruise missile or authorize a secret special-op mission.

The unilateral nature of our invasion of Iraq was problematic because we lacked sufficient military and monetary commitments from other countries. That left us to foot the bill and bear all the burden. The recklessness and unprovoked nature of the invasion also angered much of the world, harming key alliances and fueling widespread anti-americanism. A surgical strike against al Qaeda bases in Waziristan would be relatively cheap. And it's not at all clear to me that such a attack, particularly one authorized by a President Obama, would create any real international backlash. People understand why we want to take out Bin Laden.

Moreover, does Armstrong really want a foreign policy that doesn't prioritize disrupting al Qaeda? I'm all for a less interventionist, less bellicose policy toward the Middle East, but if there's one thing we should be doing, it's going after the organization that attacked us. Though I hate to admit it, I agree with Joe Klein:

[O]n Pakistan, what Obama is proposing is the precise opposite of what Bush has done. It is clear that not only is General Musharraf incapable of controlling his tribal areas, but also that there are elements of the Pakistani military and intelligence services that are actively Salafist and support the jihadis, quite possibly including the Al Qaeda leadership. Bush has chosen to do nothing about this. Which is remarkable: here's the group most successful at attacking the U.S. homeland, that has rebuilt its infrastructure (according to the national intelligence estimate), the group that Bush had vowed to make "war" upon--and we are allowing it to fester, perhaps even to plan more attacks on our citizens?

If there was ever a vital national security interest of the United States, this is it. Indeed, the Iraq war was a criminally foolish diversion from this mission.

Of course we have to be very careful with any such policy. Pakistan has nuclear weapons, after all. But the tribal regions in the North are not even under the control of the Pakistani government. So the real concern is not, as right wing bloggers would have you believe, that Pakistan will consider this an act of war and start launching nukes. The concern is that our actions will weaken Musharraf and someone scarier will seize power. But Obama certainly knows this and would have competent advisers helping him weigh the risks. He wasn't promising to carry out such an attack regardless of the circumstances.

All in all, though, I don't see what is reckless or unserious about making it clear that we cannot tolerate the very same people who attacked us on 9/11 being allowed to regroup, rebuild, and plot against us in safety. But that's what's happening right now in the hinterlands of Pakistan. Something's got to be done about that.