Senator Barack Obama--on the heels of his tussle with Hillary Clinton over foreign policy matters--delivered his most extensive speech on coping with terrorism. You can read it here. It's long and a shrewd attempt at blending get-toughism with let's-talk multilateralism. Below are a few interesting excerpts with commentary:

After 9/11, our calling was to write a new chapter in the American story. To devise new strategies and build new alliances, to secure our homeland and safeguard our values, and to serve a just cause abroad. We were ready. Americans were united. Friends around the world stood shoulder to shoulder with us. We had the might and moral-suasion that was the legacy of generations of Americans. The tide of history seemed poised to turn, once again, toward hope. But then everything changed.

Instead, we got a color-coded politics of fear. Patriotism as the possession of one political party. The diplomacy of refusing to talk to other countries. A rigid 20th century ideology that insisted that the 21st century's stateless terrorism could be defeated through the invasion and occupation of a state. A deliberate strategy to misrepresent 9/11 to sell a war against a country that had nothing to do with 9/11....

This is the standard Democratic critique of George W. Bush's foreign policy misadventures, and it's certainly well founded. But this is nothing that John Kerry did not say in 2004.

By refusing to end the war in Iraq, President Bush is giving the terrorists what they really want, and what the Congress voted to give them in 2002: a U.S. occupation of undetermined length, at undetermined cost, with undetermined consequences.

The first step must be getting off the wrong battlefield in Iraq, and taking the fight to the terrorists in Afghanistan and Pakistan....

Again, more from Kerry's playbook.

As President, I would make the hundreds of millions of dollars in U.S. military aid to Pakistan conditional, and I would make our conditions clear: Pakistan must make substantial progress in closing down the training camps, evicting foreign fighters, and preventing the Taliban from using Pakistan as a staging area for attacks in Afghanistan.

I understand that President Musharraf has his own challenges. But let me make this clear. 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 Qaeda leadership meeting in 2005. If we have actionable intelligence about high-value terrorist targets and President Musharraf won't act, we will....

Now, this is new. Obama is threatening U.S. military attacks within Pakistan. This is the get-tough aspect I referenced above. He may be right. But Pakistan is a dilemma for the United States. In Pakistan, Washington supports a strongman who took power in a coup that overthrew a civilian and democratically elected government, and it depends upon Musharraf for many counterterrorism operations. Should the U.S. lean on him, his government could be toppled by a military coup more amenable than he is to Islamic fundamentalism. Meanwhile, the democracy movement in Pakistan has increased its strength lately. So ought the United States push in that direction? Pakistan ain't easy. (Ditto for Saudi Arabia.) A U.S. military attack there might take out real evildoers. It could also backfire.

To succeed, we must improve our civilian capacity. The finest military in the world is adapting to the challenges of the 21st century. But it cannot counter insurgent and terrorist threats without civilian counterparts who can carry out economic and political reconstruction missions – sometimes in dangerous places. As President, I will strengthen these civilian capacities, recruiting our best and brightest to take on this challenge. I will increase both the numbers and capabilities of our diplomats, development experts, and other civilians who can work alongside our military. We can't just say there is no military solution to these problems. We need to integrate all aspects of American might.

Elsewhere in the speech, Obama calls for improving U.S. intelligence capabilities. All of this is much more easier said than done. Can a president snap his (or her) fingers and produce a corps of diplomats and government experts who speak obscure languages and understand distant cultures? Of course not. Six years after 9/11, the U.S. government still wants for Arabic speakers. Obama's intentions are solid, and this goal is noble. It entails a tremendous amount of hard work.

One component of this integrated approach will be new Mobile Development Teams that bring together personnel from the State Department, the Pentagon, and USAID. These teams will work with civil society and local governments to make an immediate impact in peoples’ lives, and to turn the tide against extremism. Where people are most vulnerable, where the light of hope has grown dark, and where we are in a position to make a real difference in advancing security and opportunity – that is where these teams will go.....

A Peace Corps with guns? I'm being facetious. This is a grand aim. But, as mentioned above, creating such a force--one that can be effective and function in isolated areas of the globe--is a bigger dream than landing a man on the moon. Obama is outdoing JFK.

It's time to turn the page on the diplomacy of tough talk and no action. It's time to turn the page on Washington's conventional wisdom that agreement must be reached before you meet, that talking to other countries is some kind of reward, and that Presidents can only meet with people who will tell them what they want to hear.

President Kennedy said it best: "Let us never negotiate out of fear, but let us never fear to negotiate." Only by knowing your adversary can you defeat them or drive wedges between them. As President, I will work with our friend and allies, but I won't outsource our diplomacy in Tehran to the Europeans, or our diplomacy in Pyongyang to the Chinese. I will do the careful preparation needed, and let these countries know where America stands. They will no longer have the excuse of American intransigence. They will have our terms: no support for terror and no nuclear weapons.

In other words: I'm not backing off my reply at that debate--not one inch. Obama vowed at the last Democratic face-off to meet with the leaders of Iran, North Korea, Syria, Cuba and Venezuela without considering any preconditions. Hillary Clinton and John Edwards quickly jumped on him for that. Now he's trying to turn what was portrayed as a gaffe into an asset. Maybe it will work. But my hunch is that when American voters think of "Washington's conventional wisdom," they're not saying to themselves, "Gee, it's that damn Washington groupthink that prevents the president from meeting with Kim Jong Il." Putting that aside, Obama does run into a pothole here. He justifiably slams the Bush administration's "intransigence." But in the next sentence, he presents a black-and-white ultimatum to Iran and others: you can have no nuclear weapons. To some, that will come across as intransigence, even if appropriate intransigence. In dealing with Iran, there is a bottom line: what if Tehran really, really wants nuclear weapons? What would Obama do then? This is a problem for all the Ds and Rs who are not willing to start another war.

A little more than a year after that bright September day [9/11], I was in the streets of Chicago again, this time speaking at a rally in opposition to war in Iraq. I did not oppose all wars, I said. I was a strong supporter of the war in Afghanistan. But I said I could not support "a dumb war, a rash war" in Iraq. I worried about a "U.S. occupation of undetermined length, at undetermined cost, with undetermined consequences" in the heart of the Muslim world. I pleaded that we "Finish the fight with bin Ladin and al Qaeda."

The political winds were blowing in a different direction. The President was determined to go to war. There was just one obstacle: the U.S. Congress. Nine days after I spoke, that obstacle was removed. Congress rubber-stamped the rush to war, giving the President the broad and open-ended authority he uses to this day. With that vote, Congress became co-author of a catastrophic war. And we went off to fight on the wrong battlefield, with no appreciation of how many enemies we would create, and no plan for how to get out. Because of a war in Iraq that should never have been authorized and should never have been waged, we are now less safe than we were before 9/11.

Senator Obama, a question: was Hillary Clinton part of that rubber-stamping process? Is she partly to blame for the United States now being less safe than before 9/11? Obama is certainly right to note that he got the war right. He deserves much credit for this. But how far will that get him in the Democratic contest? The Democrats in 2004 had a choice between a candidate who had opposed the war (Howard Dean) and one who had voted to authorize it (Kerry), and they opted for the latter. Four years later, will Democratic voters assign more importance to the question of who was right in 2002?

Hillary Clinton has been rather wily on this front--slowly tacking to a position where she is now as against the war as Obama and Edwards (who also voted to authorize the war). Will harking back five years do much for Obama? Probably not. But if he wants to give it a shot, he'll have to be more explicit: She helped get us into this mess; I tried to keep us out. But if he's playing for the veep position, he cannot strike her too hard. And he is also boxed in by his politics-of-hope rhetoric that seeks to position him above the usual blast-your-opponent campaigning. Slamming Clinton on the war--though he has her on points--will not be easy.

Overall, Obama's speech was a good and clear articulation of a progressive and Democratic alternative to Bushian foreign policy. It does not create much space between him and either Clinton or Edwards. But it shows he can pull together a national security team that can devise as good a campaign policy as anyone else in the race. That's not bad for someone who wants to be president.

Posted by David Corn at August 2, 2007 07:54 AM