Dispatches from the Culture War has a good summary on the issue of using U.S. forces to conduct raids in the Pakistan tribal areas where al Qaeda is believed to have strongholds.
To summarize the summary – Obama got all kinds of crap from McCain and Clinton when he said:
[H]e 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.
McCain, in particular, said that Obama’s position was “naive.” Now Bush has ordered such raids, just as Obama had suggested. No word from McCain on whether Bush’s actions were “naive.”
I have read some stuff that hints at highest-level Pakistani approval, contingent upon deniability.
Hard to tell just how much info the administration is sharing with either candidate, though.
Still, foreign policy could be a hammer for the Obama campaign. Right now, the Bush Doctrine might be taking us all on a bus trip with the Soviet Union. While the administration should be a little chary of making more promises, Cheney and Rice are out beating the drums over Georgia and the Ukraine. I’m leery of the benefits of this stance right now.
Meanwhile, Palin support’s Obama’s position on Pakistan. And on the one hand, it’s good that she doesn’t know what the Bush Doctrine even is. But on the other hand, she’s kind of accepted that war with Russia may be necessary, for the same reasons that World War I was necessary. I guess I should put “necessary” in quotation marks.