Barack Obombya

Haha, post-Iraq (if we've even actually arrived at that state), this is a dangerous dangerous comment to make. However, the "actionable intelligence" comment he makes will surely refer to far more thoroughly scrutinized evidence if a situation with Pakistan does indeed arise. If there's one real positive we can take from the Iraq situation, it's that future administrations won't be able to get away with pushing their own agendas through fronts like "wars on terrors." All in all, I see this more as Obama appealing to that portion of America which wanted to see a strong American reaction, post 9/11. Those familiar with his work (or those who've read his book) know that he pushed pretty firmly for multilateral action regarding Iraq, and it's doubtful he'd press in another country on different terms. And, heh, nice title.

This is a crazy statement by Obama. Not only is Pakistan an ally, maybe not the best, but an ally on our War on Terror. ANd don;t forget that Pakistan has nuclear weapons, and the Musharaf is holdoing onto power by the skin of his teeth, and keeping the Islamists at bay in Pakistan. This would not help us in any way. Yes, we need to put more pressure on Pakistan to quel the islamists in their country, but to openly say we are going to attack people in Pakistan will just make the Islamists more polular in Pakistan than they are now. This jsut goes to show how naive Obama is about foreign policy. At times like these the govenment will have strange bedfellows, just llok at WWII, we were aligned with Communist Russia.

I am wondering what the anti-war people think about this development. My guess is that the anti-war supporters and 9/11 conspiracy theorists will move on to the next candidate, possibly edwards. we shall see.

Hmm, well my first comment was based on my just reading the quote above. After that, I actually went and read the entire speech, which I advise everyone to do, because this quote is a pretty terrible representation of the overall message conveyed. In fact, I'll go so far as to say the media should be embarrassed for giving only this section of the speech so much coverage; I don't normally like to plug myself, but I just wrote a post on this topic at my site: http://mangoicecream.wordpress.com/2007/08/03/wha...

I see the URL did not parse (for the mangoicecream url), is HTML allowed, or is this a feature you guys will be working on in the future?

Right now html is not allowed. We're discussing adding certain tags for formatting and links, but have not done so yet.

This is a very realist point of view. Obama isn't a realist, he's a liberal-or so he says. This statement was purely reactionary. National Security is still an issue in this country. The key to winning the national election is to strike a balance between realist and liberal. Obama is much to liberal to win the election compared to Hillary. Obama made a statement that was very irrational on many levels-unilateralism, national sovereignty etc. I honestly don't believe he meant what he said. If he did, he surely doesn't understand much about foreign policy.

Another question is: Did Obama think of this statement to say? or Was Obama told to say that statement

Just to add my view: I've always wondered why there has been a huge debate on this. We can impede on Pakistan's sovereignty if we really need to. What are they going to do, nuke us? The catch is that we shouldn't if we don't have to. But if we know where OBL or Zarqawi is, there's only one reason we shouldn't bomb them: conspiracy theorists would go on a rampage without proof of death.

All he said was he would attack the terrorist targets, not any non-terrorist targets in Pakistan such as its military or the capital. If we attack a terrorist target I don’t see how Pakistan could get mad at us for that when they’re against the terrorists too. We just have to avoid hitting anything besides the terrorists.

Hey Obambi08 - how do you “avoid hitting anything besides the terrorists” when the terrorists hide amongst the innocent? Terrorists don’t wear uniforms, don’t give a damn about the Geneva conventions, and actively seek to terrorize the innocent so that the innocent will force those hunting the terrorists to abandon the fight. That’s how terrorists win - by using our decency against us.

Barack Obama insists we ought to talk to our enemies without precondition - as if the problem is only that we don’t know what our enemies want in exchange for peace. He repeats the canard that this administration has entirely refused to converse with those who hate us -but that’s a lie. The administration, and every one before it have talked to our enemies - it’s the priviledge of talking to our president that we offer sparingly. This is why we refuse one on one talks with North Korea, offering them only participation in the six party talks. They haven’t earned the opportunity to talk to President Bush, and they won’t get it until they change some of their actions that outrage all civilized countries.

Obama is all talk and no action - and not much thought either. Some would argue that he’s not stupid, he just thinks the rest of us are. That might be, but that kind of approach doesn’t sound like anything different than any other politician we’ve ever had. So much for change…