Obama's recognition

Opinion Journal:

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But in a primary contest where Democrats seem to vie with one another for the title of who will pull out of Iraq the fastest, Mr. Obama's speech is at least a recognition that he'd be willing to use military force somewhere. It's also a reminder to antiwar Democratic voters that the terror threat won't vanish when the Bush Administration does, and that U.S. soldiers will have to be put in harm's way again.

Sometimes the easiest--but worst--decision for a President is not to take military action. This was part of President Clinton's failure against al Qaeda in the 1990s, which his wife and Presidential candidate Hillary Clinton now wants to bathe in nostalgia as a simpler time when life wasn't so hard. But no one should forget that throughout the 1990s Mr. Clinton was storing up trouble with his failure to react forcefully to the first World Trade Center bombing, and to the al Qaeda attacks against U.S. embassies in East Africa in 1998 and the USS Cole in 2000.

Mr. Obama's comments also showed some welcome realism about the problem that confronts the U.S. in Pakistan. Following Mr. Musharraf's ill-conceived truce last September with Taliban-connected warlords in the Pakistani province of Waziristan, terrorist raids into neighboring Afghanistan rose threefold. Al Qaeda has also been able to substantially reconstitute itself in the area, according to the latest U.S. National Intelligence Estimate. If Pakistan is unwilling or unable to police its own territory, then no prudent U.S. President can afford to rule out special forces raids or Predator strikes, or more.

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Too bad, then, that Mr. Obama instantly squandered an opportunity for seriousness by insisting that Iraq is "the wrong battlefield" in the war on terror. In case he hasn't noticed, Iraq today is the main battlefield where U.S. forces are confronting, and killing, al Qaeda on a daily basis. And GIs don't have to invade another country to do it.

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This is why the speech was surreal. Not to mention how impractical his policy would be because he also backed the Webb Amendment which would mandate that the troops needed to implement the policy would be stuck in the US for a year or more before they could be redeployed. No one else seems concerned about this point, but it is a mistake not to take politicians at their word and hold them accountable for their policy positions.