Obama In Ankara

As promised, Barack Obama gave an address in a Muslim capital within the first 100 days of his Presidency. Speaking to the Turkish Parliament, he praised the Turkish people (including shout-outs to basketballers Hedo Turkoglu and Mehmet Okur) and argued for strong bilateral relations. The most talked-about portion of the speech will probably be the part where Obama insists that the West is not at war with Islam.

I know there have been difficulties these last few years. I know that the trust that binds us has been strained, and I know that strain is shared in many places where the Muslim faith is practiced. Let me say this as clearly as I can: the United States is not at war with Islam. In fact, our partnership with the Muslim world is critical in rolling back a fringe ideology that people of all faiths reject.

But I also want to be clear that America's relationship with the Muslim work cannot and will not be based on opposition to al Qaeda. Far from it. We seek broad engagement based upon mutual interests and mutual respect. We will listen carefully, bridge misunderstanding, and seek common ground. We will be respectful, even when we do not agree. And we will convey our deep appreciation for the Islamic faith, which has done so much over so many centuries to shape the world for the better - including my own country. The United States has been enriched by Muslim Americans. Many other Americans have Muslims in their family, or have lived in a Muslim-majority country - I know, because I am one of them.

Above all, we will demonstrate through actions our commitment to a better future. We want to help more children get the education that they need to succeed. We want to promote health care in places where people are vulnerable. We want to expand the trade and investment that can bring prosperity for all people. In the months ahead, I will present specific programs to advance these goals. Our focus will be on what we can do, in partnership with people across the Muslim world, to advance our common hopes, and our common dreams. And when people look back on this time, let it be said of America that we extended the hand of friendship.

Obama delivered that bit with sensitivity and the exact right point of view, seeking to align the Muslim world on the same side as the West against the perversion of their faith. And he pushed for a two-state solution in the Middle East, engagement with Iran, and the denial of safe havens for terrorism in Iraq and Af-Pak, and sought Turkish aid in those efforts. All fine and good.

But on the issue of Turkey's own past, Obama backslid from his past rhetoric on the subject and approached with more typical caution. It was smart to couch this in the context of Turkey's admission to the EU, and the political reforms necessary for that accomplishment. But Obama certainly pulled his punch.

Another issue that confronts all democracies as they move to the future is how we deal with the past. The United States is still working through some of our own darker periods. Facing the Washington monument that I spoke of is a memorial to Abraham Lincoln, the man who freed those who were enslaved even after Washington led our Revolution. And our country still struggles with the legacy of our past treatment of Native Americans.

Human endeavor is by its nature imperfect. History, unresolved, can be a heavy weight. Each country must work through its past. And reckoning with the past can help us seize a better future. I know there are strong views in this chamber about the terrible events of 1915. While there has been a good deal of commentary about my views, this is really about how the Turkish and Armenian people deal with the past. And the best way forward for the Turkish and Armenian people is a process that works through the past in a way that is honest, open and constructive.

We have already seen historic and courageous steps taken by Turkish and Armenian leaders. These contacts hold out the promise of a new day. An open border would return the Turkish and Armenian people to a peaceful and prosperous coexistence that would serve both of your nations. That is why the United States strongly supports the full normalization of relations between Turkey and Armenia.

The Turkish people know that Obama has called the Turkish repression of Armenians a genocide, and that's what he's referring to when he discusses "my views." He tries here to disassociate from the debate and let the Turks and the Armenians move forward with dialogue. But we have commitments to the truth in discussing human rights, and should not sidestep them. Obviously, remaining mute has not resolved this tragedy over close to 100 years. Matthew Yglesias has some good thoughts on the need for outside forces pushing Obama to the truth on this subject, and I think there's a direct parallel to world leaders pushing the Turks.

Realistically, long-run international humanitarian considerations just aren’t going to be the controlling priority of the United States government. “Pragmatic” stuff like what Obama did in his speech is bound to happen and it doesn’t really matter who you make senior director of what on the National Security Council. It’s important, however, to have strong voices in civil society capable of making the point that this kind of pragmatism, and the also-inevitable pragmatism that will surround discussion of China human rights issues, is really pretty awful. I’m not even sure it’s the wrong choice for the president to make—Turkey is an important ally and the United States has nothing to gain from poking a stick in their eye. But I’m very glad that as a private citizen, rather than a government official, I don’t need to make that choice. And I’d sort of rather that our Pulitzer Prize winning authors (he's talking about genocide expert Samantha Power -ed.) were in my position rather than in the position of being on the inevitably-losing side of internal arguments about this sort of thing.

Exactly. And in the same way, it's pragmatic for the Turks to deny the acts of their ancestors in Armenia, but strong voices in the international community ought to make the right noises on the side of truth. Otherwise, there is never a "good time" to bring up such things and the past just gets buried in the most corrosive way possible.

...Obama took a question on this at a press avail today and reiterated his views:

Q Thank you, Mr. President. As a U.S. senator you stood with the Armenian-American community in calling for Turkey's acknowledgement of the Armenian genocide and you also supported the passage of the Armenian genocide resolution. You said, as President you would recognize the genocide. And my question for you is, have you changed your view, and did you ask President Gul to recognize the genocide by name?

PRESIDENT OBAMA: Well, my views are on the record and I have not changed views. What I have been very encouraged by is news that under President Gul's leadership, you are seeing a series of negotiations, a process, in place between Armenia and Turkey to resolve a whole host of longstanding issues, including this one.

I want to be as encouraging as possible around those negotiations which are moving forward and could bear fruit very quickly very soon. And so as a consequence, what I want to do is not focus on my views right now but focus on the views of the Turkish and the Armenian people. If they can move forward and deal with a difficult and tragic history, then I think the entire world should encourage them.

And so what I told the President was I want to be as constructive as possible in moving these issues forward quickly. And my sense is, is that they are moving quickly. I don't want to, as the President of the United States, preempt any possible arrangements or announcements that might be made in the near future. I just want to say that we are going to be a partner in working through these issues in such a way that the most important parties, the Turks and the Armenians, are finally coming to terms in a constructive way.

Q So if I understand you correctly, your view hasn't changed, but you'll put in abeyance the issue of whether to use that word in the future?

PRESIDENT OBAMA: What I'd like to do is to encourage President Gul to move forward with what have been some very fruitful negotiations. And I'm not interested in the United States in any way tilting these negotiations one way or another while they are having useful discussions.

Basically... I'm not saying the word, my views are the same, and hopefully the Armenians and the Turks can work it out and get me off the hook.

The Obama Doctrine

I've been writing a lot lately about Iraq, as events on the ground are forcing it back into its inevitable position at the forefront of the Presidential campaign and our politics generally. Until we deal with the stain of Iraq, not only figuring out the best course moving forward to get our troops out of harm's way, but figuring out how to safeguard against such a hijacking of our foreign policy by narrow-minded ideologues, we're simply not going to have the energy to tackle any other big problem. Iraq will always lurk in the background and pop up at the most inopportune times. It's embarrassing that we're now going to have to give a SECOND mandate to end the war, but that's where we are. What must be clear is that whoever we empower to end the war must be trusted to do so. At this time I can't say that about a Presidential candidate who says this:

"In the last five years, our soldiers have done everything we asked of them and more. They were asked to remove Saddam Hussein from power and bring him to justice and they did. They were asked to give the Iraqi people the opportunity for free and fair elections and they did. They were asked to give the Iraqi government the space and time for political reconciliation, and they did. So for every American soldier who has made the ultimate sacrifice for this mission, we should imagine carved in stone: 'They gave their life for the greatest gift one can give to a fellow human being, the gift of freedom.'

This war was simply not something glorious that bestowed the great gift of freedom on the Iraqi people. It was a brutal and often murderous occupation that bestowed fear, anger distrust and ethno-genocide, and shattered a country. If you are so compromised that you can't admit or understand that, if your mindset is so rigid that so cannot disavow the worldview of the stupid elites who brought us to this precipice, you're actually not equipped to lead in this historical moment. Hillary Clinton is just wedded to a foreign policy vision that has outlived its usefulness. When I see her campaign staffers out-and-out calling the Obama campaign anti-Semites because they don't hew to a view of Israel 10 degrees to the right of Likudniks and settlers, I have the same reaction as Atrios:

Remember back in junior high, when you had that friend that the bullies picked on all the time? And you defended that friend, who really never did all that much for you, which led to you getting your ass kicked a few times yourself? And then you got to high school and your friend joined up with the bullies? It's kind of like that.

The familiar line for a lot of bloggers is that Clinton and Obama's policies are virtually identical, but this is not true in the area of foreign policy. More to the point they have radically different mindsets for a 21st-century American foreign policy in a dangerous world where our power has eroded due to the tragedy of Iraq. Spencer Ackerman wrote a really insightful article called "The Obama Doctrine" that lays out his vision of "dignity promotion". Obama's foreign policy team by and large opposed the invasion of Iraq, and united by their correctness on that issue, they make a very compelling case for a new way of looking at the world. This is a long excerpt, but necessary because it's important to focus on his foreign policy shop's argument.

This ability to see the world from different perspectives informs what the Obama team hopes will replace the Iraq War mind-set: something they call dignity promotion. "I don't think anyone in the foreign-policy community has as much an appreciation of the value of dignity as Obama does," says Samantha Power, a former key aide and author of the groundbreaking study of U.S. foreign policy and genocide, A Problem From Hell. "Dignity is a way to unite a lot of different strands [of foreign-policy thinking]," she says. "If you start with that, it explains why it's not enough to spend $3 billion on refugee camps in Darfur, because the way those people are living is not the way they want to live. It's not a human way to live. It's graceless -- an affront to your sense of dignity."

During Bush's second term, a strange disconnect has arisen in liberal foreign-policy circles in response to the president's so-called "freedom agenda." Some liberals, like Matthew Yglesias in his book Heads In The Sand, note the insincerity of the administration's stated goal of exporting democracy. Bush, they observe, only targets for democratization countries that challenge American hegemony. Other liberal foreign-policy types, such as Thomas Carothers and Marina Ottaway of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, insist the administration is sincere but too focused on elections without supporting the civil-society institutions that sustain democracy. Still others, like Kenneth Roth of Human Rights Watch, contend that a focus on democracy in the developing world without privileging the protection of civil and political rights is a recipe for a dangerous illiberalism.

What's typically neglected in these arguments is the simple insight that democracy does not fill stomachs, alleviate malaria, or protect neighborhoods from marauding bands of militiamen. Democracy, in other words, is valuable to people insofar as it allows them first to meet their basic needs. It is much harder to provide that sense of dignity than to hold an election in Baghdad or Gaza and declare oneself shocked when illiberal forces triumph. "Look at why the baddies win these elections," Power says. "It's because [populations are] living in climates of fear." U.S. policy, she continues, should be "about meeting people where they're at. Their fears of going hungry, or of the thug on the street. That's the swamp that needs draining. If we're to compete with extremism, we have to be able to provide these things that we're not [providing]."

This is why, Obama's advisers argue, national security depends in large part on dignity promotion. Without it, the U.S. will never be able to destroy al-Qaeda. Extremists will forever be able to demagogue conditions of misery, making continued U.S. involvement in asymmetric warfare an increasingly counterproductive exercise -- because killing one terrorist creates five more in his place. "It's about attacking pools of potential terrorism around the globe," Gration says. "Look at Africa, with 900 million people, half of whom are under 18. I'm concerned that unless you start creating jobs and livelihoods we will have real big problems on our hands in ten to fifteen years."

Obama sees this as more than a global charity program; it is the anvil against which he can bring down the hammer on al-Qaeda. "He took many of the [counterinsurgency] principles -- the paradoxes, like how sometimes you're less secure the more force is used -- and looked at it from a more strategic perspective," Sewall says. "His policies deal with root causes but do not misconstrue root causes as a simple fix. He recognizes that you need to pursue a parallel anti-terrorism [course] in its traditional form along with this transformed approach to foreign policy." Not for nothing has Obama received private advice or public support from experts like former Clinton and Bush counterterrorism advisers Richard Clarke and Rand Beers, and John Brennan, the first chief of the National Counterterrorism Center.

While foreign policy establishment types like George Packer nitpick around the details and grow frustrated that Obama doesn't embrace their pet concerns about what happens if things go wrong (which always weds us to bad policy), Obama is actually thinking big here, and laying forth an idea of public diplomacy that would really drain away the conditions that foster radical extremism. The kind of people who can only contemplate foreign policy with guns won't be likely to understand. And this is not, by the way, to say that Obama wouldn't be willing to use force when necessary. Apparently he's more willing than Clinton or McCain to do so against bin Laden, or at least he's more willing to say it out loud. Obama's vision and the idea of sustainment - that we sustain international order through prosperity and rebuilding our legitimacy as a world leader - share a lot of parallels. We use force when absolutely necessary, but we don't back down from using the tools of soft power to lift up impoverished nations and restore our moral capacity to lead.

I don't know if he'll be able to pull it off; certainly there are pitfalls, given the near-hegemony of the "serious thinkers" on foreign policy in Washington. But there's really no sense in not trying, and making this a watershed election, a full break from the past.

But while the doubts about Obama contain fair points, they also, to a certain degree, reflect a triumph of the Iraq War mind-set. Why not demand the destruction of al-Qaeda? Why not pursue the enlightened global leadership promised by liberal internationalism? Why not abandon fear? What is it we have to fear, exactly?

"He goes back to Roosevelt," Power says. "Freedom from fear and freedom from want. What if we actually offered that? What if we delivered that in the developing world? That would be a transformative agenda for us." The end of the Iraq War mind-set, it turns out, may be the beginning of America's reacquaintance with its best traditions.

I noted earlier today this piece of video from Obama where he critiques Hillary Clinton for not believing in bottom-up democracy. I actually think he's critiquing the whole Washington establishment.



A bottom-up vision of foreign policy does work on the ground instead of looking to the elites to make the decisions necessary from the top-down. It's community organizing at the macro level. It responds not to our "vital national interests" but individuals, in an age when one individual can wreak destruction. It's why I support Sen. Obama. Bottom-up democracy is exactly what we need.

Iraq Slips Off The Table

For a few days, I've been saying that the Obama campaign needed to turn the tables on the Clinton campaign, suggesting that her rhetoric didn't match reality on issues like NAFTA and, in particular, Iraq. There was plenty of evidence that she would not pull our troops out with anything resembling speed. Well, they brought it up today, but the problem it they did so from a defensive crouch:

The skirmishing over Samantha Power continued on an Obama campaign conference call moments ago, with the action shifting over to this recent interview with Power about Obama's commitment to withdrawing from Iraq.

In that interview, Power said the following about Obama's future approach to withdrawal from Iraq: "He will, of course, not rely on some plan that he’s crafted as a presidential candidate or a U.S. Senator." As Ben Smith notes, she seemed to be expressing "a lack of confidence that Obama will be able to carry through" his withdrawal plan.

Asked about the comments on the call, Plouffe argued that Obama's commitment to pulling out of Iraq was "rock solid." He also pointed out that Retired General Jack Kean, who is close to Hillary, had recently characterized Hillary's approach to Iraq as follows:

"I have no doubts whatsoever that if she were president in January '09 she would not act irresponsibly and issue orders to conduct an immediate withdrawal from Iraq, regardless of the consequences, and squander the gains that have been made."

The parallel isn't perfect, but Plouffe's push-back nonetheless seems fair here -- the larger point is that both candidates, for obvious reasons, want to preserve some wiggle room for themselves on Iraq.

This effectively ends this as an issue. It's now a he said/she said, and I don't think the Obama campaign is skilled enough politically to ignore their own vulnerabilities on this issue and just press forward and say "She won't end the war and I will."

This is extremely damaging to the Obama campaign. He needed to take an issue and run with it and Iraq made the most sense. His strength is supposed to be as an antiwar candidate. Obama gave me some hope by talking about how he not only wanted to end the war, but end the mindset that got us in there. But I don't see him pushing this much further, and in fact he's getting pushed around. He's losing the bar fight primary and it doesn't give me hope that he can stand up to the Republicans.

UPDATE: Here's Obama today in Wyoming.



That's not bad. We'll see how this goes.

Apply The Standard

I confess to being a little pissed off that the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of A Problem From Hell: America and the Age of Genocide, someone with a fresh and engaging perspective on foreign policy, someone that Democrats should be pushing to get involved in the foreign policy arena, can have her political career put on ice for a three-second indiscretion, making a comment that approximately every staffer of a high-stakes campaign has said about their opponent at one time or another, if not worse. But that's politics, and Samantha Power didn't want to be a distraction, so she quit. I wish her well and hope she would have a very high-ranking job in a potential Obama Administration.

Well, then we have to fairly apply the standard. Calling Barack Obama Ken Starr is the equivalent of calling him a monster in Democratic circles. Howard Wolfson needs to resign.

(The point, for the dense, is that NONE of them should have to resign over something they say. Are we all three years old?)

Furthermore, Hillary Clinton should resign, as long as we're using this yardstick, for claiming that there's some imaginary threshold needed to be commander-in-chief and you can only cross it by marrying a President and sipping tea with Sinbad in Kosovo.

“I think that since we now know Sen. McCain will be the nominee for the Republican Party, national security will be front and center in this election. We all know that. And I think it’s imperative that each of us be able to demonstrate we can cross the commander-in-chief threshold,” the New York senator told reporters crowded into an infant’s bedroom-sized hotel conference room in Washington.

“I believe that I’ve done that. Certainly, Sen. McCain has done that and you’ll have to ask Sen. Obama with respect to his candidacy,” she said.

Calling McCain, the presumptive GOP nominee a good friend and a “distinguished man with a great history of service to our country,” Clinton said, “Both of us will be on that stage having crossed that threshold.”

This infuriates me on so many levels. It's an example of even-McCainism, where Democrats hide between the legs of manly John McCain and prop up his dangerous ideas on national security for no good reason. Someone who frightens military leaders and top aides with his hotheaded temper and batshit crazy ideas about constant war. Nobody who thinks this kind of stuff has crossed the threshold to be so much as a dogcatcher:

But what you may not have heard is an extended critique of the kind of Commander in Chief that Captain McCain might be. To combat what he likes to call "the transcendent challenge [of] radical Islamic extremism," McCain is drawing up plans for a new set of global institutions, from a potent covert operations unit to a "League of Democracies" that can bypass the balky United Nations, from an expanded NATO that will bump up against Russian interests in Central Asia and the Caucasus to a revived US unilateralism that will engage in "rogue state rollback" against his version of the "axis of evil." In all, it's a new apparatus designed to carry the "war on terror" deep into the twenty-first century.

"We created a number of institutions in the wake of World War II to deal with the situation," says Randy Scheunemann, McCain's top adviser on foreign policy. "And what Senator McCain wants to begin a dialogue about is, Do we need new structures and new institutions, both internally, in the US government, and externally, to recognize that the situation we face now is very, very different than the one we faced during the cold war?" Joining Scheunemann, a veteran neoconservative strategist and one of the chief architects of the Iraq War, are a panoply of like-minded neocons who've gathered to advise McCain, including Bill Kristol, James Woolsey, Robert Kagan, Max Boot, Gary Schmitt and Maj. Ralph Peters. "There are some who've moved into his camp who scare me," Wilkerson says. "Scare me."

First is an unnamed "new agency patterned after the...Office of Strategic Services," the rambunctious, often out-of-control World War II-era covert-ops team. "A modern day OSS could draw together specialists in unconventional warfare; covert action operators; and experts in anthropology, advertising, and other relevant disciplines," wrote McCain in Foreign Affairs. "Like the original OSS, this would be a small, nimble, can-do organization" that would "fight terrorist subversion [and] take risks." It's clear that McCain wants to set up an agency to conduct paramilitary operations, covert action and psy-ops.

Why the hell would you want to validate and legitimize that kind of dangerous nonsense? McCain's neoconservatism has been totally rejected and shown to be a farce. Praising him at the expense of a Democratic opponent who might end up being the nominee is the worst kind of stupidity. McCain has neither the ideas or the temperament to be commander-in-chief. Period.

Hillary Clinton can either resign, or stop this tactic of being continually shocked about random comments. And Obama, for his part, can stop playing the part of a wounded animal and buy in to this browbeating.

Friday Random Ten

For the third day in a row I woke up with one of those "freecreditreport.com" jingles in my head, so I need a Random Ten to wash it out like the Grand Canyon:

Everything's Ruined - Fountains of Wayne
The Train - Outkast
Never Let Me Down - Kanye West feat. Jay-Z & J.Ivy
Don't Let's Start - They Might Be Giants
I Feel It All - Feist
Paint It Black - The Rolling Stones
Catchy - Pizzicato Five
Fighting In A Shack - The Shins
Maps - The Yeah Yeah Yeahs
Hours (El-P Remix) - TV On The Radio

P.S. I'd also love to know all the words that Hillary Clinton's advisers have used to describe Barack Obama off the record. They're not profane or anything, so I'm sure it mostly falls along the lines of "wonderful chap." Certainly none of them shoudl resign.

Campaign staffers hate the opponent. Absolutely worthy of a two-day discussion. Ugh.

The Pakistan Flap

If you don't agree with Barack Obama that, when faced with the resurgence of Taliban and Al Qaeda forces in northwest Pakistan, we should not defer to Pervez Musharraf if he demurred with a go-ahead for air strike against actionable terrorist targets, then you don't believe in the current policy of this country, as Joe Biden rightly suggested last night. This notion that Obama said he was going to invade Pakistan is nonsense. I can see, when the issue moved for no good reason into the area of nuclear weapons, why people would get pissed off.

Twenty years ago, everybody in this country (give or take a baker’s million blazing nutjobs) understood that the use of nuclear weapons was a cataclysmic, final act of madness, a step towards global suicide to be avoided at (almost) any cost. Now, absent an enemy with any real ability to do us harm, the idea that nuclear weapons should be available to use on caves full of crazy idiots armed with weapons that were the height of military sophistication approximately seventy years ago, this idea is the conventional wisdom? Of the Democratic Party? The party that ostensibly wants to end the war in Iraq? Where have you gone, Robert McNamara / A nation turns its loony eyes to you, doot doot doo.

Indeed. And it should be mentioned that nukes were thrown into the discussion by reporters, and it certainly wasn't the impetus of Obama. It should also be mentioned that nobody in the Congress on the Democratic side has done more to stop nuclear proliferation than Barack Obama. I understand that some in Pakistan are protesting the notion of military action whatsoever, and are claiming that Obama's comments weaken the war on terror. And even Republicans are calling his statements "dangerous" (these are the guys that all agreed on tactical nuclear strikes against Iran).

I'm sorry, but I don't agree. Pakistan is not a reliable ally so long as they're allowing safe havens in their own country. I believe these safe havens threaten the sovereignty Pakistan itself, as we've seen from the series of attacks over the past month. Obama spoke softly and carried a big stick, and preferred to do it in public rather than behind closed doors as Hillary Clinton would prefer ("there are some things you just don't say"). Samantha Power, who I repsect greatly, wrote a long note to this effect, framing the Pakistan situation as one in which Obama challenged the stale conventional wisdom that has brought us to the foreign policy disaster we now face. Obama didn't create this mess; he didn't support Musharraf's peace treaty with the Taliban; he didn't look the other way as wealthy Saudis funded terror (and he certainly didn't offer them billions of dollars in weapons for their trouble). He simply is trying to deal with solutions to the problems as they exist, and in DC this is considered something too brash and fresh for words.

Over the last few weeks, Barack Obama has once again taken positions that challenge Washington’s conventional wisdom on foreign policy. And once again, pundits and politicians have leveled charges that are now bankrupt of credibility and devoid of the new ideas that the American people desperately want.

On each point in the last few weeks, Barack Obama has called for a break from a broken way of doing things. On each point, he has brought fresh strategic thinking and common sense that break with the very conventional wisdom that has led us into Iraq [...]

Terrorist Sanctuaries: For years, we have given President Musharraf hundreds of millions of dollars in military aid, while deferring to his cautious judgment on how to take out high-level al Qaeda targets – including, most likely, Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri. Here is the result:

* Bin Laden and Zawahiri – two men with direct responsibility for 9/11– remain at large.
* Al Qaeda has trained and deployed hundreds of fighters worldwide from its sanctuary in northwest Pakistan.
* Afghanistan is far less secure because the Taliban can strike across the border, and then return to safety in Pakistan.

By any measure, this strategy has not worked. Conventional wisdom would have us defer to Musharraf in perpetuity. Barack Obama wants to turn the page. If Musharraf is willing to go after the terrorists and stop the Taliban from using Pakistan as a base of operations, Obama would give him all of the support he needs. But Obama made clear that as President, if he had actionable intelligence about the whereabouts of al Qaeda leaders in Pakistan – and the Pakistanis continued to refuse to act against terrorists known to be behind attacks on American civilians – then he will use highly targeted force to do so.
Barack Obama’s judgment is right; the conventional wisdom is wrong. We need a new era that moves beyond the conventional wisdom that has brought us over-reliance on an unreliable dictator in Pakistan and an occupation of Iraq.
Nuclear Attacks on Terrorist Targets: For years, Washington’s conventional wisdom has held that candidates for President are judged not by their wisdom, but rather by their adherence to hackneyed rhetoric that make little sense beyond the Beltway. When asked whether he would use nuclear weapons to take out terrorist targets in Pakistan and Afghanistan, Barack Obama gave the sensible answer that nuclear force was not necessary, and would kill too many civilians. Conventional wisdom held this up as a sign of inexperience. But if experience leads you to make gratuitous threats about nuclear use – inflaming fears at home and abroad, and signaling nuclear powers and nuclear aspirants that using nuclear weapons is acceptable behavior, it is experience that should not be relied upon.

Barack Obama’s judgment is right. Conventional wisdom is wrong. It is wrong to propose that we would drop nuclear bombs on terrorist training camps in Pakistan, potentially killing tens of thousands of people and sending America’s prestige in the world to a level that not even George Bush could take it. We should judge presidential candidates on their judgment and their plans, not on their ability to recite platitudes.

I completely agree.

UPDATE: I knew I heard Hillary say the exact same thing about Pakistan once. This argument seems to be about almost nothing.