Obama’s latest–”Osama bin Laden and his top leadership — the people who murdered 3,000 Americans — have a safe haven in north-west Pakistan, where they operate with such freedom of action that they can still put out hate-filled audio tapes to the outside world. That’s the result of the Bush-McCain approach to the war on terrorism.”
So spoke Obama. But would he please spell out exactly what he would do instead of the “Bush-McCain approach” to get bin Laden out of Waziristan, and how he would go beyond our present Predator strikes and stealthy incursions? In the past he has advocated open incursions into Pakistan (“The first step must be to get off the wrong battlefield in Iraq and take the fight to the terrorists in Afghanistan and Pakistan.” / “If we have actionable intelligence about high-value terrorist targets and President Musharraf won’t act, we will.”); does he still advocate that?
Unmentioned is that in 1998 (during the golden Clintonian years of diplomacy) Pakistan went nuclear. That fact and its fragile governments might explain why bin Laden hasn’t been bombed or taken through an overt American invasion. And when Obama says “We would make a decision to bring the full weight of not only U.S. justice but world justice down on him” I hope he’s not thinking of something like the Milosevic experience, in which the mass murderer died unconvicted after four years of captivity and an OJ-like circus at the World Court at The Hague.