WASHINGTON — President Bush secretly approved orders in July that for the first time allow American Special Operations forces to carry out ground assaults inside Pakistan without the prior approval of the Pakistani government, according to senior American officials.
The classified orders signal a watershed for the Bush administration after nearly seven years of trying to work with Pakistan to combat the Taliban and Al Qaeda, and after months of high-level stalemate about how to challenge the militants’ increasingly secure base in Pakistan’s tribal areas.
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Democratic presidential candidate Sen. Barack Obama said on Wednesday the United States must be willing to strike al Qaeda targets inside Pakistan, adopting a tough tone after a chief rival accused him of naivete in foreign policy.
Obama's stance comes amid debate in Washington over what to do about a resurgent al Qaeda and Taliban in areas of northwest Pakistan that President Pervez Musharraf has been unable to control, and concerns that new recruits are being trained there for a September 11-style attack against the United States.
Obama said if elected in November 2008 he would be willing to attack inside Pakistan with or without approval from the Pakistani government, a move that would likely cause anxiety in the already troubled region.
"If we have actionable intelligence about high-value terrorist targets and President Musharraf won't act, we will," Obama said.
For those of you keeping score, the Bush Administration is already quietly adopting Obama's foreign policy positions on Afghanistan, Iraq, and Iran, and McCain has himself adopted Obama's position on Afghanistan after chiding him for it. This, then, makes the fifth time the Republicans have mocked Obama's foreign policy only to appropriate it as their own later. Or, as it was expressed 4 years ago, being against it before they were for it.
It's not a flip flop, however, because John McCain was a POW.
Josh Marshall notes the trend of the Bush Administration and the McCain campaign both quietly adopting Barack Obama's positions in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Iran:
Let's run the list.
McCain and now the White House (via the DOD) are moving toward more US troops in Afghanistan -- a position they've each long opposed and which Obama has been on record in support of for at least a year.
Bush and McCain have each also in different ways tried to nudge closer to Obama's position on withdrawing troops from Iraq. The key shoe falling today is President Bush's embrace of a "time horizon" for withdrawing troops from Iraq. Meanwhile, McCain's declaration of military victory in Iraq seems very much like an effort to get people thinking the troops are coming home soon within the conceptual architecture of his professed goals in Iraq.
And finally Iran. I'm not certain what McCain himself has said about Iran in recent days. But over recent months a key line of attack from the president and John McCain has been that Obama is a latter-day Neville Chamberlain for saying we should negotiate with Iran. And now over recent days we've learned that the White House is sending one of its top diplomats to negotiate directly with Iran's nuclear negotiator. And there are growing signs the White House is poised to open a diplomatic interests section (an unofficial diplomatic outpost) in Tehran.
It may all just be an attempt to build some last-minute bragging rights while taking Iraq off the table in the election, but at the end of the day this is still John McCain and George W. Bush tacitly conceding that Barack is right about getting out of Iraq and negotiating with Ahmadinejad, and they were wrong.
One hell of a story, if you can find someone to report it.
We learned yesterday, despite a nearly complete media blackout on the story, that John McCain has abandoned his policy on Afghanistan and has adopted Barack Obama's. From the Huffington Post:
John McCain likes to paint Barack Obama as a naive follower on key national security issues. But by moving up his planned Afghanistan speech by two days to follow Obama's, and by agreeing that more U.S. troops are needed there, McCain appears to be following the Illinois Democrat on a major proposed shift for U.S. foreign policy.
Last month, Joint Chiefs chairman Adm. Michael Mullen said he needed at least three brigades shifted to Afghanistan, but that "troop constraints were preventing such a move."
Democrats trumpeted the statement as vindication, but McCain's campaign held its line and "resisted calls for more [U.S.] troops" in Afghanistan. ... Flash-forward to today. As the AP reported, McCain was set to discuss the economy, with an address on Afghanistan scheduled for Thursday. But the campaign ditched its planned focus on jobs (although not its banner) to follow Obama's lead -- not only by talking about national security but by joining him in calling for more American troops in Afghanistan.
Nearly an hour after Obama finished his D.C. speech, in which he repeated his call for "at least two additional combat brigades" to be sent to Afghanistan, McCain stepped to his podium across the country in New Mexico and tried to one-up his Democratic rival. As McCain's website now says, the Arizona Republican wants "at least three additional brigades" for the fight in Afghanistan.
Barack Obama: a leader John McCain can believe in.
Following that, we hear this morning of a striking reversal in a notorious Bush Administration. From AP:
In a break with past Bush administration policy, a top U.S. diplomat will for the first time join colleagues from other world powers at a meeting with Iran's chief nuclear negotiator, The Associated Press has learned.
William Burns, America's third highest-ranking diplomat, will attend talks with the Iranian envoy, Saeed Jalili, in Switzerland on Saturday aimed at persuading Iran to halt activities that could lead to the development of atomic weapons, a senior U.S. official told the AP on Tuesday.
So you've probably heard by now that Hillary had a hell of a time in the debate the other day. She got caught faking a position on an admittedly complex immigration issue, and Dodd, Edwards, and Obama ripped her a new one (and are continuing to today). And worst of all, it actually got media coverage; Brian Williams made time to show it, as did Katie Couric, as well as our local news.
On the other hand, I'm always talking about made-up scandals and traditional media values that predispose them to harping on certain (unimportant) issues while glossing over or not even noticing other (actually important) ones. Is this all smoke, just more b.s. from the same Beltway crowd that spent 8 long years deriding and wagging their fingers at her husband because, as David Broder famously put it, "he came over here and trashed the place, and it's not his place?" Will this matter a wit in the primary?
That depends entirely upon whether voters decide it matters. I know, that sounds like a cop-out, but we've seen rhetorical stumbles derail presidential campaigns before. Anyone remember "Actually I voted for it before I voted against it..."? I'm tempted to conclude that the reason that line succeeded so mightily and stood out from all the rest of the chatter so much is because it was something 1. out of Kerry's own mouth that 2. got widespread media coverage when people were listening and 3. perhaps most importantly, fed an already existent, if inchoate, narrative about John Kerry (in this case, the "flip-flopper").
Comparing the two, notice that Hillary's gaffe is similar, but not perfect. It was words that she said herself, and it feeds an emerging narrative about Hillary that she has no core values, but has incredible ambition, and thus will "say anything to get elected." She was confronted with a case where the more popular position was not apparent, and she couldn't find a position. I think that she's vulnerable to such a narrative (as are, frankly, all Democrats simply because they are Democrats), and there is still time to fall.
In fact, I think Hillary is more vulnerable to this narrative because of her electoral strategy. The reason that Hillary is favored among both liberals and centrists, among big business dems and pro-regulation dems, among anti-war voters and defense contractors, is because she's opted to become a cypher. People ridicule Obama for being too vague on policy, but the fact is that Hillary has made it a point to talk big about how the Iraq War should be stopped, or how we need a new health care system, or we need to stop climate change, and then she releases a plan that wows with detail but leaves all the big doors open.
Will Hillary stop the Iraq War? Hillary wants to keep a residual force there; how big would that "residual force" be? 1,000? 10,000? 100,000? She won't say, and that's the $64,000 question that decides whether she is pro-war or anti-war, isn't it? If 100,000 troops remain in Iraq past 2013, in what way has she "ended" the war?
And what about health care? She says she'll set up a government-run alternative health insurance for the poor, but how good will it be compared to private health insurance? That is the central question, because nationalized health care is capable of being far more efficient and negotiating lower prices, which would make it an attractive alternative even for those with private insurance. But if she's had it vetted by the insurance industry, which she says she has, how would they allow such a thing unless it was kept artificially shitty so that no one would actually opt for it unless they had no other choice?
Hillary talks a big talk, talks about change and reform and whatnot, but on every position she's left herself an out to avoid the reformist position if she so chooses, and that makes people able to see in her whatever they want to see. Anti-war democrats will tell you with a straight face that Clinton is the candidate to end the war, and no matter how many times you throw that residual force nonsense in their face, they continue to press the issue because they only see what they want to see. Meanwhile, several prominent hawks have said they support Hillary because she's the one least likely to end the war, and claim she's never said anything about ending the war. They see in her what they want to see because Hillary gives them both options.
That's why this moment in the debate is trouble: she tried to do the same thing here, to give people both options so that everyone thinks she took their own position, but she flubbed it and got caught. I think Edwards' attack was the most damaging ("I think I just heard Hillary give 2 different positions in 2 minutes") because it highlighted her actual strategy. That's exactly what she did.
Hillary's actually lucky that no other moments from the debate went viral, because not long at all before the immigrant driver's license snafu, she was asked to pledge that "Iran would not get nuclear weapons during her administration," and she resorted to dissembling so juvenile that the audience actually laughed at her answer:
It was a stupid move. She should've just pledged.
But I digress. "Will this actually damage her campaign?" is the issue. There's a big reason to believe it won't: the number 2 above--getting widespread media coverage when people are listening. Yeah, Brian and Timmy and Katie and John Stewart all covered it, but there's reason to believe that very few voters have really started paying attention to the race yet. How little attention, you may ask? Well, only 59% of Americans-- slightly over half-- can nameeven one single Republican running in the primary. And "most" are unable to even name any Democrats other than Hillary and/or Obama. Furthermore, it is still 2 months until the first primary, and 3 or 4 months until most of the country actually votes. Not to mention, the debate itself was on MSNBC, not exactly the most watched primetime spot.
If people did notice, however, I think this could get out of hand for Hillary pretty quickly. Suddenly li'l Timmy (not to mention actual voters!) would be focused on getting specifics out of her that slam the door on all those little outs, and as she's forced to take actual positions on everything, many will become less pleased with her, but any attempts to hedge, even the slightest bit, would further legitimize the narrative and undermine her credibility and perceived integrity.
Then, and only then, will we have ourselves a race.
President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said Iran would free the 15 detained British sailors and marines Wednesday as an Easter holiday ''gift'' to the British people.
He said the captives, who were seized while on patrol in the northern Persian Gulf on March 23, would be taken to the airport at the end of the news conference that he was addressing. An Iranian official in London said they would be handed over to British diplomats in Tehran.
The release of the crew members would end a 13-day standoff between London and Tehran that was sparked when the crew was seized as it searched for smugglers off the Iraqi coast. Britain denied Iranian claims the crew had entered Iranian waters.
I gotta hand it to the British and Iranian diplomats who figured out how to defuse this issue, this situation looked pretty thorny to me, anyway, and I think the solution looks pretty good for everyone. Iran releases the hostages but gets to look strong and magnanimous, British thanks them without having to "apologize" and goes on its merry way, no harm no foul (that is, assuming the prisoners were treated well, and indications are they were).
Does anyone else find it more than a little sad that we had to rely on Iran's respect for the Geneva Conventions and willingness to compromise, and the US and UK not f**king this up with their obtuseness and belligerence?
Sy Hersh has written a great article, available in the New Yorker (yes, that does mean it's long-- unlike The Economist, however, that also means it's worth it) on the web of relationships and power politics in the Middle East, focusing especially on Iran, Syria, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Lebanon, and the US. It's a complex situation for sure, but a narrative that emerges almost immediately is that the US lunged headlong into an impossible strategic situation in Iraq, propelling its longtime enemies (and those of its allies) to increased power. The same action virtually forced us to take opposite sides in Iraq (i.e., the Shiite allies of Iran and Syria) from those we take everywhere else (the Sunnis-- specifically the Saudi royal family), thus making the situation even worse for everyone in the region... except Iran, the one player we want to screw over all others.
Now our #2 ally in the Middle East and #1 financier, Saudi Arabia, openly threatens to side with those currently killing the most US troops if we dare to leave.
