It’s certainly not my intention to defend Barack Obama’s approach to foreign policy every day, but this latest flap is just odd.
Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton drew another distinction between herself and Sen. Barack Obama yesterday, refusing to rule out the use of nuclear weapons against Osama bin Laden or other terrorists in Afghanistan and Pakistan.
Clinton’s comments came in response to Obama’s remarks earlier in the day that nuclear weapons are “not on the table” in dealing with ungoverned territories in the two countries, and they continued a steady tug of war among the Democratic presidential candidates over foreign policy.
The AP asked Obama whether there was any circumstance in which he would be prepared or willing to use nuclear weapons in Afghanistan and Pakistan to defeat terrorism and bin Laden. The senator responded, “I think it would be a profound mistake for us to use nuclear weapons in any circumstance” in Afghanistan or Pakistan.
His critics pounced, attacking Obama for having taken the nuclear deterrent off the table. “Presidents since the Cold War have used nuclear deterrents to keep the peace, and I don’t believe any president should make blanket statements with the regard to use or nonuse,” Clinton said.
Except that’s not what Obama said. He said he wouldn’t use nukes against al Qaeda. Of course he wouldn’t. No one would. The fact that this even became a major media dust-up yesterday is bizarre.
It started with a dumb question, but grew in earnest when an initial AP report quoted Obama saying he wouldn’t use nuclear weapons ‘in any circumstance,” without noting the context of the question or the answer. It made it appear that Obama would remove the nuclear deterrent entirely, against any potential enemy, anywhere. The mistaken media report made its way around the political world while the truth was still getting its pants on.
Indeed, Obama’s response to the question shouldn’t have even been noteworthy.
Michael O’Hanlon, a Brookings Institution scholar, said Obama “clearly gave the right answer.”
“He’s certainly right to say you would never use a nuclear weapon to get Osama bin Laden,” he said. He said that if intelligence officials were able to locate bin Laden with the precision required for a nuclear attack, they would also be able to catch or kill him by more conventional means that would not signal to the world that using nuclear force is acceptable.
The Obama campaign was still responding to the uproar late in the afternoon. “If we had actionable intelligence about the existence of high-level al-Qaeda targets like Osama bin Laden, Senator Obama would act and is confident that conventional means would be sufficient to take the target down,” said Bill Burton, a campaign spokesman. “Frankly we’re surprised that others would disagree.”
As am I. Would Obama’s Democratic rivals, some of whom were anxious to go after him yesterday, seriously consider a policy of using nuclear weapons to kill groups of terrorists in Afghanistan or Pakistan? If not, what are we even talking about here?
This week, Obama has been slammed, repeatedly, as a result of sloppy reporting. Did Obama suggest he would invade Pakistan? Of course not, but you probably heard several reports saying he did. Did Obama suggest he would never consider a nuclear response to any enemy, under any circumstances? Of course not, but that was the lead political story throughout much of the political world yesterday afternoon.
This isn’t necessarily about Obama; this is about Democratic candidates getting slammed by unfair coverage. It happened to Gore, it happened to Kerry, and now it’s happening to the top tier of the Democratic field. There’s no excuse for it.