Blue Crab Boulevard

To Heck With Our Enemies, Let’s Invade Our Allies

Barack Obama, in what can only be described as insanity, has just made a speech warning that he would invade Pakistan if he felt that government was not doing enough to curb terrorists. Harshly critical or the Iraq war, he proposes invading an ally.

WASHINGTON - Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama said Wednesday that he would possibly send troops into Pakistan to hunt down terrorists, an attempt to show strength when his chief rival has described his foreign policy skills as naive.

The Illinois senator warned Pakistani President Gen. Pervez Musharraf that he must do more to shut down terrorist operations in his country and evict foreign fighters under an Obama presidency, or Pakistan will risk a U.S. troop invasion and losing hundreds of millions of dollars in U.S. military aid.

"Let me make this clear," Obama said in a speech prepared for delivery at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars. "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-Qaida leadership meeting in 2005. If we have actionable intelligence about high-value terrorist targets and President Musharraf won't act, we will."

The excerpts were provided by the Obama campaign in advance of the speech.

Obama's speech comes the week after his rivalry with New York Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton erupted into a public fight over their diplomatic intentions.

Obama said he would be willing to meet leaders of rogue states like Cuba, North Korea and Iran without conditions, an idea that Clinton criticized as irresponsible and naive. Obama responded by using the same words to describe Clinton's vote to authorize the Iraq war and called her "Bush-Cheney lite."

Let's see in a week or so we have had Obama say that stopping genocide was no reason to stay in Iraq, that he would personally meet with heads of rogue states and that he would invade a nuclear-armed ally. I think we may just have witnessed the implosion of Obamania. The darling of many of the nutrootz is willing to ignite a regional war against an ally. Good lord.

UPDATE: Some pithy comments from some others: Just One Minute, Redstate, Sister Toldjah, Texas Rainmaker, The Strata-Sphere, Jammie Wearing Fool, Clayton Cramer, Wizbang, Captain's Quarters, QandO, Michelle Malkin,

Politics, War, World news | Gaius Wednesday, 1 August , 2007

By Jack, Wednesday, 1 August , 2007 @ 8:44 am

The man is a marvel.

No doubt about it.
By Increase Mather, Wednesday, 1 August , 2007 @ 8:53 am

He’s right about Pakistan and their seeming lack of interest in rooting out terrorists. But this is NO way for a liberal to get the Democrat Party nomination. Who besides Joe Lieberman in that party would vote for him? Assuming Lieberman is still a Dem.
By Purple Avenger, Wednesday, 1 August , 2007 @ 9:03 am

Nuance baby, nuance.

This guy is such a lightweight, he’d float away if he wasn’t tethered.
By rlpete2, Wednesday, 1 August , 2007 @ 9:36 am

Calling Pakistan an allie is almost as much a stretch as calling the Saudis our friends.

Musharrif is riding a tiger, risking his life every day giving us what help he can, but the Pakistani armed forces, intelligence and most of the population are supportive of the Taliban and Osama, especially in the Pashtung region.

The Saudis have not suffered the consequences of funding al Quaida and teaching terrorism in their schools. I’d like to see us flatten a couple nice grand mosques in Arabia. (Hey, it’s permissible. Religious sites are legal targets, like thge Golden Mosque of Samarra and the huge Buddhas in Afghanistan.)

And, with our missiles, we don’t have to recruit gullible kids to go on suicide missions. Oops, I guess we are doing that, after all.
By moderationbarryg, Wednesday, 1 August , 2007 @ 9:57 am

I think Obama plays very well with normal Americans.

Ask this question in a poll: “Do you favor Obama’s proposal of going after terrorists in Pakistan even if it means alienating our Muslim allies?”

My guess is 80% of Americans would say yes. I voted for W because he did something. This action puts Obama to the right of most GOP candidates.

I don’t care about Pakistan or Islam. If it is a fight (and it is) let’s go get them wherever they live. I would love to see W posing over bin Laden’s dead carcass. Let us get all enemies of the USA and let their friends weep over our lack of manners.

And remember, the same voices that will say that Obama is “naieve” are the ones urging us to call off the surge. One’s enemies enemies are NOT one friends.
By Strike does not = invasion, Wednesday, 1 August , 2007 @ 9:58 am

< ?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?> < !DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">
Use Crabitat Brand Astroturf Remover®.

Cut and paste comment removed. It was already plastered at just about every blog that allows comments.
By Gaius, Wednesday, 1 August , 2007 @ 10:01 am

Full spin ahead!
By moderationbarryg, Wednesday, 1 August , 2007 @ 10:12 am

I would not vote for Obama, or any Democrat. I don’t think I would even vote for Lieberman.

My question is this: why do we tip toe around our Muslim “friends”?

I think it is a good proposal to go after the Islamic terrorists wherever they live. We should separate message from messenger. The throwing Obama off the bus because he isn’t part of the beltway brainwashing is different from rejecting him because he is a liberal.

Getting serious with Pakistan is a good conservative idea.Reject Obama, but don’t use the MSM meme of accomodation to their stranglehold of acceptable ideas to reject him.
By Gaius, Wednesday, 1 August , 2007 @ 10:21 am

Unilateral cross-border attacks are an act of war. (It is not improper to dub such an event an ‘invasion’.) Such cross-border actions should either be officially or unofficially sanctioned by the other country involved or it risks making the situation even worse.
By moderationbarryg, Wednesday, 1 August , 2007 @ 1:30 pm

With due respect to Don Singleton, we cannot cower before so-called “friends” like Pakistan because they have nuclear weapons.

Would we attack them if they officially announced they were giving Safe Haven to Al Qaida? I hope so!A good case can be made that they are already doing just that.

I think President Bush should consider attacks on Iran and Pakistan and any country that gives aid and comfort to our enemies. I would even favor ultimatums to the Saudi’s.

We have one worthy and reliable ally in the Muslim world: Israel. Israel is a democracy, it is an open society, it is a place we would feel at home. The Islamic World is a 15th century prison.

I am not a member of the Israel lobby either, I am a Christian. But our foreign policy should make both the USA and Israel more secure and make the Islamists fearful of us.

We must never surrender to Islam and its enablers. I repeat: I would not vote for Obama for Dog Catcher, but those of us who love America should not be afraid to upset the Islamic World. That is what I hear in too much of the meme that has united conservative critics and the dreadful MSM. The MSM is trying to declare that we cannot criticize, much less attack, our Islamic “friends” (and what could Pakistan do to become an enemy?)
By Chris, Wednesday, 1 August , 2007 @ 4:25 pm

< ?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?> < !DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">
So, let me get this straight. Iraq is an unwinnable quagmire, where the army has been trained by us, and is our ally against terrorists, but we should invade Pakistan, whose army is probably rife with Islamists, and who possesses many nuclear weapons, which would fall into the hands of terrorist enablers if Musharraf was to fall, which he would undoubtedly do in the event of an American invasion.

That's *** brilliant, that is.

(Edit: Language)
By Chris, Thursday, 2 August , 2007 @ 7:33 am

Sorry about the language, Gaius. I forgot myself for a moment.
By Gaius, Thursday, 2 August , 2007 @ 7:49 am

NP - that’s why I edited it rather than nuke it. Regulars get that courtesy if I have time.