I read
http://www.barackobama.com/2007/08/01/the_war_we_need_to_win.php">Obama's big terrorism speech. The only mention of a possible military option regarding Pakistan was this:
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.
I don't see how anyone reads this as anything other than a call for targeted strikes should their be clear intelligence indicating that Bin Laden is in the tribal regions of Pakistan.
Yet from the headings in the AP and from the apoplectic posts on DU and other corners of the blogosphere, you'd think he was calling for a full-on, 500,000-strong invasion of Pakistan.
Among other points in the speech, Obama implicitly accused Bush of ignoring warnings of an Al Qaeda attack...
Thanks to the 9/11 Commission, we know that six years ago this week President Bush received a briefing with the headline: "Bin Ladin determined to strike in U.S."
It came during what the Commission called the "summer of threat," when the "system was blinking red" about an impending attack. But despite the briefing, many felt the danger was overseas, a threat to embassies and military installations. The extremism, the resentment, the terrorist training camps, and the killers were in the dark corners of the world, far away from the American homeland.
... and explicitly repudiated the Bush Doctrine of "preventive war" and the war in Iraq...
We did not finish the job against al Qaeda in Afghanistan. We did not develop new capabilities to defeat a new enemy, or launch a comprehensive strategy to dry up the terrorists' base of support. We did not reaffirm our basic values, or secure our homeland.
Instead, we got a color-coded politics of fear. Patriotism as the possession of one political party. The diplomacy of refusing to talk to other countries. A rigid 20th century ideology that insisted that the 21st century's stateless terrorism could be defeated through the invasion and occupation of a state. A deliberate strategy to misrepresent 9/11 to sell a war against a country that had nothing to do with 9/11.
And so, a little more than a year after that bright September day, I was in the streets of Chicago again, this time speaking at a rally in opposition to war in Iraq. I did not oppose all wars, I said. I was a strong supporter of the war in Afghanistan. But I said I could not support "a dumb war, a rash war" in Iraq. I worried about a " U.S. occupation of undetermined length, at undetermined cost, with undetermined consequences" in the heart of the Muslim world. I pleaded that we "finish the fight with bin Ladin and al Qaeda."
The political winds were blowing in a different direction. The President was determined to go to war. There was just one obstacle: the U.S. Congress. Nine days after I spoke, that obstacle was removed. Congress rubber-stamped the rush to war, giving the President the broad and open-ended authority he uses to this day. With that vote, Congress became co-author of a catastrophic war. And we went off to fight on the wrong battlefield, with no appreciation of how many enemies we would create, and no plan for how to get out.
Because of a war in Iraq that should never have been authorized and should never have been waged, we are now less safe than we were before 9/11.
Military options were largely discussed in the context of Afghanistan and were strictly limited in scope. The thrust of the speech was an emphasis on diplomacy, international cooperation, withdrawal from Iraq, increased aid to vulnerable countries in the Muslim world and, yes, a tougher - but hardly militaristic - approach to Pakistan.
How this is being spun as a militaristic speech is somewhat baffling.
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