Democrats on Pakistan

The Washington Post reports a notably stupid and inflammatory remark:

[David] Axelrod, a senior Obama strategist, was more direct [than the candidate], linking the Pakistani crisis to the different positions that [Hillary] Clinton and Obama took on the Iraq war in 2002, when Clinton voted to authorize it in the U.S. Senate, and Obama, then an Illinois state senator, spoke out against it.

"Obama opposed the war in Iraq explicitly because he feared it would divert our attention from al-Qaeda, Pakistan, the whole region," Axelrod said. "It underscores the fact that you have to have a president who understands the world, who is going to analyze these events, and who will chart the right course, counter to the conventional thinking."

I strongly disgree with the proposition that the war in Iraq is or ever has been a distraction from the struggle against Islamist terrorism. But my more immediate concern is that Barack Obama patently doesn't understand the world, as was demonstrated by his eagerness to talk to the leaders of rogue states without any hint of pressing them for concessions in return. The remarks of his aide must surely imply that had Obama's views on Iraq been followed, then there would have been no incitement to the murder of Benazir Bhutto. The only other interpretation I can make of such remarks is that, in some unspecified way, the US might have been able to prevent Mrs Bhutto's murder had its forces not been engaged in opposing terrorism and autocracy in Iraq. So either Obama is committed to a view of the stimulus for Islamist terrorism (if that is indeed the force behind the assassination) that pays no attention to Islamist ideology, or he grossly overestimates the ability of the US to influence events in other (nominally friendly) countries.

In either case, I find Obama's incomprehension and inexperience alarming. As a European leftist who cares more than anything about the defence of liberal values against our totalitarian enemies, I have an intense interest in Hillary Clinton's winning the Democratic nomination.