Following up on yesterday's post, I see that Josh Marshall has entered the fray, offering up analysis that largely tracks mine. An excerpt:
And the truth is that I think Obama's actual words are so clearly unobjectionable that this is all Kabuki theater of a particularly strained and disingenuous sort. 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.
But this is what is so bizarre about this whole thing. Not only have Republicans quibbled with it, they have done so in ways that directly and completely contradict almost everything they've ever said about fighting terror.
McCain says that we shouldn't announce ahead of time what we're going to do, but in a previous debate, he announced he would go to the "gates of hell" if he had to to catch bin Laden. Rudy Giuliani said that, unlike Obama, he would ask permission before doing anything, implying that if it wasn't granted he wouldn't act. Romney said that in a "civilized world," we can't just go sending our troops wherever we want.
And this is what has astonished me about the entire episode. Each of these people has made statements that obviously directly contradict many of the things they supposedly stand for, but none of them have been called on it. Part of the problem, I suspect, is that rather than agree with Obama's statement of a policy she already agreed with, Clinton instead tried to turn the whole thing to her advantage by quibbling over a minor point. That allowed other Dems to get in on the anti-Obama bandwagon, so that when the Republican candidates started making nonsensical statements, there was no one left to attack them. Which really is quite unfortunate given that, as Josh says, Obama really has hit upon "the central folly of our post-9/11 counter-terrorism defense policy." This could have been a real moment about the general campaign, but instead it has turned into an artificial one about the primary campaign.
Subscribe to this blog's feed
