God help John McCain. Seriously. He’s down in the polls. He’s acting unpredictably and without reason. His running mate can’t give any specific answers whatsoever to serious questions. And now it looks like he’s either running to Obama’s left on terrorism or he thinks the people of Waziristan were born yesterday. Last year, Obama said that he would pursue high-level al Qaeda targets in the border regions of Pakistan near Afghanistan if the Pakistani government refused. Bush and others felt compelled to speak out against it, even while he kept employing the strategy many times himself.
McCain has also denounced the proposition not on moral grounds, but practical grounds (and weak ones, at that). In the debate on Friday night, he said the following: “You don’t say that out loud. If you have to do things, you do things.” Would Mr. McCain mind telling me how he is committing to anything less than Obama is? Obama has essentially reaffirmed an existing policy of taking unilateral action to hit al Qaeda terrorists in Waziristan. McCain in the debate gave tacit approval for that kind of action as well, only that he didn’t want to “announce it ahead of time,” as he explained today.
What he was explaining, of course, was the fact that his running mate also supports the policy of unilateral action in Pakistan’s tribal areas, and that that doesn’t contradict his own policy at all. So basically, McCain and Bush are in favor of hitting al Qaeda whether or not Pakistan approves it ahead of time — they just don’t approve when Obama talks about it.
–Dan Rozenson
