And apparently Obama's statement played well in Nevada.

Don't worry, he will.  He really put the cat among the pigeons and the Republicans keep attacking him instead of Hillary, all the better.  This is a general election issue which puts the GOP candidates on the backfoot on national security and makes the Bush administration look like a bunch of hacks.

For now, though, he doesn't have to say anything but  affirm his position.  I am starting to think he really does have a chance.  And what a cream puff question he has provided to the media, they are just going to keep asking this over and over until it melts into conventional wisdom.  Bravo, Obama.

Hillary missed the bus on this one.

Right or wrong on the issue, he doesn't have any other choice but to go after the Republicans, Romney in particular.  He has to make the argument that we are less safe today because we have effectively ceded the security of this country to a foreign president.  Putting election year politics aside, it's pretty scary to know that our security is in the hands of Mushareff rather than our president.  And if reporters on the ground in Pakistan are right--that Mushareff is only jerking us around to collect the money--it's even more scary!  In your opinion, if Al Qaeda does attack the US again, would it hurt or help the GOP?

If she was smart on this, she would DEFEND him against Republican attacks on this point.

I know it seems counterintuitive but it is not often Dems have a chance to be the tough ones on terror.

I am an Edwards supporter, but I agree with the above post. When someone says something and no matter how many times it is explained and peo still go with the incorrect version of what someone has said- the conclusion can no longer be that they are misinterpreting what the speaker said- its deliberate.

As far as I can tell, Hillary did not distort his message on this point. Indeed, I think she agreed with him.  

The standard line is that "if you're explaining, you're losing."

I agree with BTD on the politics of this and I think Obama absolutely cannot get bogged down in explaining "wait, I didn't mean an invasion, I only meant..."  He needs to stick to his message.

No one in their right mind thinks that.  Only his enemies are willing to pass that lie.

I agree with you that the Republican attacks are pure gold for Obama.

I just worry that by going to the right of the Republicans, we end up in a bad place at the end of the day.  We may get elected, but then we're in a position of having to out-tough the Republicans in practice, and it may be bad for the country.  LBJ felt he had to prove that he wasn't soft on Communism, and look how that turned out.

But it's hard to dispute that this is effective politics, even if it leaves a bit of a bad taste in my mouth.  Compare Obama's statement - staking out a tough stance on a substantive issue - with, say, Evan Bayh proclaiming that Democrats "need to show" they're not weak on national defense.

Yeah, that's the brilliant part.  He doubled their bet and called them.  And nobody even apparently noticed, did they?  Ha.

He proved that you can have a tough, coherent Democratic position without needing to adopt Republican talking points or caving in any way.  It's a great platform.

Right, and unilateral military action in Pakistan will really strengthen those moderates. Look how well our democracy funding is strengthening Iranian moderates!

Keep heading down this path and we would pull off another Iraq. All the moderates will be dead or refugees.

Rove would have attacked.  But he'd have argued that Obama wastoo big a pussy to make good on the threat.

The current bunch is floundering.

Being nakedly political with foreign policy and employing your staff to over-hype your comments is what's too clever.  Nobody can credibly believe that a couple of cruise missile strikes are going to root Al Qaeda out of Waziristan.  If we are going to do that it is going to take a sustained campaign.

But that isn't something we can do unilaterally, we have to have allies on the ground.  Obama's bragging approach about violating Pakistani sovreignty, something the Pakistani's in the gov't and the street take fairly seriously, makes that harder.

But proposing our  non-solution quick fix isn't good politics in the long term.  Especially since I doubt Obama is willing to follow up militarily with the logic of his own campaign spin.  Which is to say a couple of quick strikes aren't going to push Al Qaeda out of there.  

All of the other, much better, proposals in his speech have been lost because of this one intentionally provocative statements, spun out for political purposes.

There is evidence to the contrary.  I believe Obama has hurt himself with Democrats quite a bit over these last 2 weeks.  In fact, to me there is no doubt about that.  The polls had been steady for quite some time, immovably stuck at a certain narrow range.  That is no longer the case.  Also, amongst Democrats Obama's negatives have shot up while Clinton's positives have gone up at the same time.  

I guess this disagreement will only be solved by reality just happening, but I personally believe that Obama way overshot his goal, thereby feeding the inexperienced narrative and forcing people to choose between Clinton and himself (many were wavering between the two, liked both equally well.)  

He/she does that all the time.  You get used to it.  He/she is our secret weapon against Hillary, a genuine mole.

She wrote a diary over on dkos that got panned royally and then has one up over here claiming it was a success.

I am very much at odds with Dodd on the politics of this issue. But in a way, it is understandable. Dodd is looking for traction on the Left edge of the Party.

From that perspective, his critique might make sense.

My point is a different one - it is good politcs for Obama and for once, for Dems generally.

I pride myself in being able to step away from the interest of my preferred candidate in analyzing these things.

Of course, that is easier when your candidate is a longshot at best.

I feel the policy is very sound, but the delivery wasnt.

I am sorry it felt like an attack I didn't intend it as one.  However I do note that polls came out that prove me right.  Obama has dropped another few points and Clinton has picked up points.  I'm right.  Obama looks like he is not ready for prime time.  Once again he made a stupid rookie statement on National TV. Out of the top three candidates she looks like the only adult.  Too bad Dodd, Richardson and Biden aren't picking up more support  because Obama and Edwards just seem to keep losing ground the more they attack Clinton.  Neither one looks Presidential compared to her.

No, and that's why we got whupped.  Again and again.

Could viewed as Rhetoric.

Hey. It's all rhetoric.

An armed attack by the United States against suspected terrorists in Pakistan is also an attack against Pakistan. Framing the policy as Obama has here, "if he won't act, we will" ... you're with us or you're against us, is the same mistaken approach to destroying terrorist organizations that the Bush administration has taken. The rhetoric and the policy alienates the people whose support you need to root out terrorists from civilian populations.

My concern about the Obama comments are not just electoral; I have serious concerns about more Middle Eastern destabilization.  His comments may help him get elected, but we have soldiers and civilians to think about.  

I am referring to the recent Power's book review in the New York Times where she says:

Shapiro is at his most persuasive when he argues against lumping Islamic radical threats together. He points out that at the time of the cold war, George Kennan, the formulator of the containment policy, warned against treating Communism as a monolith. Policy makers, Kennan said, ought to emphasize the differences among and within Communist groups and "contribute to the widening of these rifts without assuming responsibility." The Bush administration, by contrast, has grouped together a hugely diverse band of violent actors as terrorists, failing to employ divide-and-conquer tactics.

She works for Obama on foreign policy, so part of her job is to defend his statements. While she may be defending his statements other campaign surrogates are clarifying them, in an interview with TPM Obama adviser Greg Craig said "No one is saying that you should disregard Pakistan's sovereignty". It is unclear to me how Obama would disregard Musharraf and "act" in Pakistan and yet not disregard Pakistan's sovereignty.

I am very familiar with Article 51, and with how poorly the Security Council system deals with non-state actors. But you, Obama and I are all aware that Pakistan has been cooperative with U.S. actions against Al Qaeda around the world, unlike the Taliban were in Afghanistan. Obama took a cheap shot at Musharraf to win political points with independents, the very audience that Clinton is beginning to win from him with her 'experience' narrative.

Great point. Obama's Pakistan  comments are remarkably like vintage Bush, similar to the kind of thing Bush would have said before hubris and reality set it.  I find Defence Secretary Gates' comment on being asked by Tim Russert about breeching Pakistan without Musharraf's knowledge admirably restrained. Even when pressed, Gates said: "I think we would not act without telling Musharraf what we were planning to do." Now this may not be true, but it signals that Gates understands the intense importance so called Third World countries place on respecting their sovereignty. Given most of these nations' hard won, often bloody struggle from British or French rule, sovereignty is encoded in the DNA of these countries. It is at their very core of who they are.

Its interesting that the Republican Secretary of Defence in a Bush administration seems more aware of the importance of sovereignty to post-colonial Pakistan, than Obama, whose Kenyan heritage (Kenya suffered especially from the brutality of British colonial rule) and years in Indonesia show little of no sensitivity to the repercussions of his foreign policy formulations. Maybe this was Obama's international Sista Souljah moment, but it won him few friends around the world, and this from a candidate who is trying to sell a "new" kind of foreign poilcy. What's the point of a more intelligent Bush with a dusky hue?

Obama is increasingly erratic these days, like a gambler down to his last chip placing huge bets and deferring the consquences. Bash Pakistan now to appear tough, to hell with their sovereignty. Bash Democrats as part of the Washington beltway problem, Indpendents are more important to me he seems to say. All these risky calculations with as yet not much pay off. The steady consistency and restraint of Hillary Clinton is looking increasingly more appealing as days go by.

So, what makes you think that the US army could go in there without getting embroiled in heavy guerrilla warfare?

Best case scenario is another Tora Bora. As I know you know, a successful outcome in Tora Bora would have required thousands of US ground troops blocking the escape routes. A week of the heaviest bombardment we can deliver, guided by CIA ops from a mountain top lighting up targets with laser guidance, didn't net any of the "high-value" Al Qaeda targets that were there.

It's the same mountain range, just over an imaginary borderline.

If we have learned any lesson from Iraq, it would be that we should never again understimate the difficulties of fighting a non-traditional (army on army) war.

This was a NY times article on July 8, 2007 by Mark Mazzati.

I am, of course, well familiar with that. Makes you stop and think doesn't it? If Rumsfeld and Cheney had cold feet, it's probably a pretty high risk scenario.

The idea of a clean "snatch 'n grab" of Bin Laden (if he's alive) or Zawahiri is a pipe dream. If it were that simple, we'd just drop a Hellfire missle up their keisters. Or say hello with a couple of stealth bombers. Good lord, look at what we dumped on bin Laden's head at Tora Bora.

So you parachute several hundred US commandos in to the mountains of Waziristan, they get embroiled in fierce gunfights. Then, what?

The lesson we all should have learned from Iraq is that, before you openly put combat forces on the ground in an Islamic country, you sure better think through the possible scenarios if things don't go perfectly according to the neocon playbook. It is possible, you know, that the tribal people of Waziristan would not "welcome the US as liberators" so to speak.

What Obama was doing was simply a low-level version of the typical Cheney sabre rattling. There was nothing good that could come from Obama's open challenge to Musharrif. It was a campaign stunt, nothing more, nothing less...at the expense of US relations with a (nominal) ally who has a tenuous grasp on his country.