Barak Obama just delivered the most important speech of the 2008 campaign so far. Having stepped to Hillary’s left on the issue of meeting with Castro, Ahamdinejad, Chavez et al, he is now going to her right by pledging himself to military strikes on al Qaeda safe havens in Pakistan if Musharraf won’t deal with the problem himself.
If, through positions such as this, Obama can establish himself as credible on national security he will have removed one of the major obstacles to him being elected president. Here’s the key passage of his speech:
“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.”
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