Reaction To Obama's Foreign Policy Speech

Here is some of the reaction to Obama's important enunciation yesterday of his what his foreign policy emphasis's would be (Obama: Iraq Distracting From Other Threats):

Andrew Sullivan:

what's interesting to me is how the speech is about much more than Iraq. It's about focusing on Pakistan, on energy independence, and on Iran. It's a speech that might have been given by the first president Bush. The difference with McCain will not be as acute as it might once have been, thanks in part to General Petraeus, and it seems to me that the judgment about whether a timetable will help prod the Iraqis to faster progress or threaten the gains we have made this past year is about pragmatism rather than ideology. My sense is that reassuring the Iraqis we do intend to leave by date certain will help move the progress along and help Maliki. But this is something that has to be measured in real time, and judging now what we should be doing next February is foolish. Our choice will be rooted in a core judgment of whether Obama's instincts will be better than McCain's - in blending the diplomacy, military tactics and strategic vision to win the war on terror.

The most effective retroactive part of the speech is conjuring the missed opportunities that the Iraq misadventure has ensured; the most effective forward-looking part is about securing loose nukes and insisting that we have no long-term plans for staying in Iraq.

Josh Marshall

I think TPM was one of the first places to note that what most of the media was playing as McCain calling for an Afghanistan Surge (TM) today was actually his abandoning his position and adopting the position Obama's been pushing for a year. Even Mark Halperin eventually caught on ...

Now I see this post from my old pal Juliet Eilperin who reports at the Post's Trail blog that just after giving his speech adopting Obama's Afghanistan policy, McCain hopped on the Straight Talk Express (TM) and changed his position again. After telling the crowd in Albuquerque that he would send three additional combat brigades to Afghanistan, that he might get NATO to supply the additional troops instead. "We need to work that out, we need to have greater participation from our NATO allies, and we need a lot more help from our NATO allies," said McCain.

Now, as we noted, he may have switched his position because the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs recently said that while we need additional troops in Afghanistan we can't send any because they'd have to come from Iraq.

Countdown on MSNBC: