That was it. Obama’s answer to a question of how, as commander-in-chief, he would change America’s “military stance” in response to an attack by al Qaeda did not involve using the military. ~Byron York

God forbid, a thousand times, that I should ever say anything really in support of Barack Obama or the other Democrats being targeted here, but it seems odd that Mr. York would be so dismissive of Obama’s view on when to use force overseas, since Obama’s stated view is not terribly different from the one that I assume most conservatives would endorse.  Only a few days ago Obama gave an unequivocal statement making clear that he was perfectly willing to use military force, even pre-emptively:

No President should ever hesitate to use force – unilaterally if necessary – to protect ourselves and our vital interests when we are attacked or imminently threatened. But when we use force in situations other than self-defense, we should make every effort to garner the clear support and participation of others – the kind of burden-sharing and support President George H.W. Bush mustered before he launched Operation Desert Storm.

In other words, Obama did not even rule out using force for reasons other than self-defense, which means that he has no principled or fundamental objections to interventionist wars as such.  This is a progressive foreign policy of the old Wilson-Roosevelt-New Frontier type, and I certainly don’t mean that as a compliment.  But why should conservatives who endorse activist, interventionist foreign policy find fault with it as a “weak” approach to foreign threats?  For someone who supposedly represents the wild and wooly antiwar fringe of the left–as Mr. York probably sees them–Obama sounds an awful lot like a dyed-in-the-wool CFR man.  

Obama didn’t repeat this line about the use of force during the debate, which means that he performed poorly in the debate (as many observers have already noted).  You can knock his ability to perform under pressure (I would be happy to chime in on this point), but if there is anything wrong with Obama’s approach to foreign threats it is that he believes that every crisis around the world is potentially a threat to American security.  He seems to have no sense of proportion of what constitutes a particularly dire threat and what poses a more long-term, manageable danger; diseased Indonesian chickens and loose Russian nukes seem to worry him equally.  But his lame debate performance has no necessary bearing on what Obama thinks about responding to terrorist attacks or foreign threats, since the man plainly stated his hyper-ambitious concept of American national security just this week.

Mr. York’s entire column is dedicated to belittling answers to a fairly obnoxious hypothetical question.  Without precise information about the nature and origin of simultaneous terrorist attacks, no serious person could answer the question with anything more than generalities about “swiftly responding” and so forth.  Were the two attacks the work of Al Qaeda alone?  Were they committed with only minimal or no collaboration from other groups?  Were they sponsored in coordination with a foreign government?  Were the attacks conventional, biological, or nuclear in nature?  Who knows?  Brian Williams will just keep asking his bad questions and make the candidates dance a jig to his tune.  Obviously, the nature of the response, beyond the obvious call to “retaliate,” and the “stance of the military” overseas (which was the phrase used in the question) would depend on what kind of threat America faced.  If there were  mustard gas attacks launched by a jihadi cell in a couple malls, that would call for a different change in military posture overseas than would the detonation of Pakistani nukes in Houston and Miami.  Obviously.   

This question was not quite as bad as the one that Williams asked when he pressed the candidates to list the top three allies of the United States.  What a stupid question.  Even in the Bush Era, we have managed to retain a few more than three very important allies and it is almost childish to demand that a candidate rank the relative importance of Britain, Germany, Japan, France, Canada, Russia, India, Italy and Spain, to name just a few of the more important.  In making that list, I have left off a number of countries allied with the U.S. in some fashion–does that mean that I don’t think they are valuable allies?  This is the ultimate triumph of soundbite politics over the responsible discussion of foreign affairs.  Different allies have different functions, different alliances have different purposes and good relations with all of them are obviously desirable.  A question like this will create uncertainty in foreign capitals if, say, Edwards rattled off a Britain-Japan-Israel list and Obama listed Britain-India-Germany (I believe he actually listed the EU and Japan before getting distracted).  The Japanese and Israelis will want to know why Obama has no respect for them, while the Indians will think that Edwards doesn’t think much of the relationship with New Delhi, when the list may have absolutely no bearing on the candidate’s view of other alliances.  I hope a future moderator puts the same stupid questions to the Republican field, so that they can be tripped up by having to give answers that will satisfy no one.   

Update: Meanwhile, Michael Goodwin at The New York Daily News had a completely different take on Obama’s answer to the very same question:

With only about five minutes to go in the sober Democratic debate last night, it seemed there would be no memorable moment, and thus no winner.

Then Barack Obama suddenly showed why he is the surprise of the political season. With a strong voice and a confident, focused look, he returned to a question about a hypothetical terror attack on two U.S. cities to deliver a minilecture about the need for a President to be willing to use our military might. Saying we face “a profound security threat,” he shattered the developing anti-war tenor of the debate to say there “is no contradiction” in using diplomacy and the military.