In the last two televised debates – one by the Repub. presidential field on Sunday morning and one by the Dems. on Tuesday evening – Sen. Barack Obama has been accused of cluelessness and recklessness for saying that he would try to capture or kill Osama bin Laden if he knew where the Al Qaida leader was hiding in Pakistan, and that he would do it with or without the cooperation of Pakistan’s president, Gen. Pervez Musharraf.

So are any of the Obama critics saying that they would forgo a chance to get bin Laden if Musharraf wanted them to stay away? No. Not a one. Mayor Rudy Giuliani actually said he would have the same policy as Obama, then tried to change his answer to the popular “keep that option open.” (To his credit, moderator George Stephanopoulos insisted on reading Giuliani’s former answer aloud, which, as you’ll see below, was not “keep the option open,” but “I think I would take that option.”

To be fair to Obama’s critics, when pressed, they end up going into some version of it’s-not-that-Obama’s-stated-policy-is-wrong, but-it’s-a-mistake-to-talk-about-it-openly. (Of course, if that’s really the sin, they’ve all pretty much committed it by acknowledging publicly that they would “keep that option open.”

To be slightly cynical, what they are all trying to do is play on the Obama-is-a-rookie-and-he-will-make-rookie-mistakes theme. Obama doesn’t have a lot of foreign policy experience. I have friends who see that as the main reason they are looking for someone else.

Personally, I have an odd take on the rookie issue because, as I noted and in a past life and documented in some detail, our greatest president was our least qualified in terms of conventional pre-White House experience, and some of our worst presidents have been some of the most credentialed.

And to be slightly cynical about Obama, it’s easy to believe that the speech in which he made his Pakistan comment was partly designed to demonstrate that even though he is the only top-tier presidential candidate who opposed the Iraq war before it started, he is not a wimp and would be prepared to use force if, for example, he could get bin Laden in his sights.

But I digress. The point is to get to what Obama actually said and what the others have said about it, into fuller context and, at the risk of going on rather long below (that’s your warning), to offer a little case study of  how much less there often is than meets the eye in one of these momentary contretemps that break out regularly during the debates and typically become the focus of the stories written by poor ink-stained wretches of the mainstream media who have to file a summary of the debate within a few minutes of the closing bell.

On Aug. 1, in a speech at the Woodrow Wilson Center in Washington, titled “The War We Need to Win,” Obama emphasized that Iraq was a distraction, and that the response to 9/11 should concentrate on finishing the fight with Al Qaida. If he becomes president, Obama said he would reduce U.S. troop presence in Iraq, add troops in Afghanistan and:

 ”I will send a clear message: we will not repeat the mistake of the past, when we turned our back on Afghanistan following Soviet withdrawal. As 9/11 showed us, the security of Afghanistan and America is shared. And today, that security is most threatened by the al Qaeda and Taliban sanctuary in the tribal regions of northwest Pakistan.

Al Qaeda terrorists train, travel, and maintain global communications in this safe-haven. The Taliban pursues a hit and run strategy, striking in Afghanistan, then skulking across the border to safety.

This is the wild frontier of our globalized world. There are wind-swept deserts and cave-dotted mountains. There are tribes that see borders as nothing more than lines on a map, and governments as forces that come and go. There are blood ties deeper than alliances of convenience, and pockets of extremism that follow religion to violence. It’s a tough place.

But that is no excuse. There must be no safe-haven for terrorists who threaten America. We cannot fail to act because action is hard.

As President, I would make the hundreds of millions of dollars in U.S. military aid to Pakistan conditional, and I would make our conditions clear: Pakistan must make substantial progress in closing down the training camps, evicting foreign fighters, and preventing the Taliban from using Pakistan as a staging area for attacks in Afghanistan.

I understand that President Musharraf has his own challenges. But let me make this clear. 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... 

It’s the bolded portion in the last paragraph that has been pilloried by his rivals in both parties. Note that Obama specified that he would act if Musharraf wouldn’t, which implies that the option of having Musharraf do the job himself or do it with Musharraf’s cooperation would be preferable if possible. What’s the problem with this policy? 

Mitt Romney at the Aug. 5, Iowa debate:

“I think Barack Obama is confused as to who are our friends and who are our enemies. In his first year, he wants to meet with Castro and Chavez and Assad, Ahmadinejad. Those are our enemies. Those are the world’s worst tyrants. And then he says he wants to unilaterally go in and potentially bomb a nation which is our friend. We’ve trying to strengthen Musharraf. We’re trying to strengthen the foundations of democracy and freedom in that country so that they will be able to reject the extremists. We’re working with them — we’re working with them…

STEPHANOPOULOS: But if your CIA director called and said, “We had Osama bin Laden in our sights, Musharraf says no,” what do you do?

ROMNEY: It’s wrong for a person running for the president of the United States to get on TV and say, “We’re going to go into your country unilaterally.” Of course, America always maintains our option to do whatever we think is in the best interests of America. But we don’t go out and say, ‘Ladies and gentlemen of Germany, if ever there was a problem in your country, we didn’t think you were doing the right thing, we reserve the right to come in and get them out.’ 

 We don’t say those things. We keep our options quiet. We do not go out and say to a nation which is working with us, where we have collaborated and they are our friend and we’re trying to support Musharraf and strengthen him and his nation, that instead that we intend to go in there and potentially bring out a unilateral attack. Recognize, to win the war on jihad, we have to not only have a strong military of our own — and we need a stronger military — we also need to have strong friends around the world and help moderate Muslims reject the extreme. Because ultimately the only people who can finally defeat these radical Islamic jihadists are the Muslims themselves.”

Here’s Giuliani, at the same debate, note that his attempt to rephrase what Obama should have said is pretty close to what Obama did say:

“I believe the senator didn’t express it the right way. I think the senator, if he could just say it over again, might want to say that we would encourage Musharraf to allow us to do it if we thought he couldn’t accomplish it. But the reality is, America cannot take…

STEPHANOPOULOS: But if he said no, you’d go in.

GIULIANI: I didn’t say I would go in. I said I wouldn’t take the option off the table.

STEPHANOPOULOS: No, well, you actually said, “I would take that option.”

GIULIANI: I said I would keep that option open. In any event…

STEPHANOPOULOS: No, you said, “If we have a chance to catch bin Laden and we’ve got to do it ourselves because we’re not sure if somebody is going to do it correctly, yeah, I think I would take that option.”

GIULIANI: Well, I would take that action if I thought there was no other way to crush Al Qaida, no other way to crush the Taliban, and no other way to be able to capture bin Laden. I think Pakistan has, unfortunately, not been making the efforts that they should be making. I think we should encourage them to do it, we should put the pressure on them to do it, and we should seek their permission if we ever had to take action there…”

In case you would like to read these exchanges in even fuller context, (first of all, I salute your attention span and second of all) here’s a link to the full debate transcript. I recommend searching for the word “actionable” to get to the right neighborhood.

At the Democratic debate Tuesday evening, Sens. Hillary Clinton and Chris Dodd expanded on the theme that Romney and Giuliani had raised. Between them, they basically argued that undermining Musharraf would be a major disaster, raising the horrid possibility that Pakistan, which has nukes, could fall under the control of Islamist extremists. But they didn’t really explain how Obama’s statement would have that effect, which requires a certain amount of imagination.

If you read through the excerpts below, you’ll also see that none of the Democrats (like none of the Republicans) said they would allow the Musharraf issue to prevent them from pulling the trigger and Clinton, especially, implied that she would.

 Moderator Keith Olbermann invited the fray by asking Dodd what he meant when he said of Obama : “Senator Dodd, last week you had said that Senator Obama, quoting you, ‘His assertions about foreign and military affairs have been, frankly, confusing and confused… He should not be making unwise categorical statements about military options.’

DODD: … Words mean things. We’ve got to be very careful about language that is used in terms of the danger and harm it can do to our nation. My view was, when issues were being raised about Pakistan, understand that while General Musharraf is no Thomas Jefferson, he may be the only thing that stands between us and having an Islamic fundamentalist state in that country.

So while I would like to see him change, the reality is: If we lose him then what we face is an alternative that could be a lot worse for our country. I think it is highly irresponsible of people who are running for the presidency and seek that office to suggest we may be willing unilaterally to invade a nation here that we are trying to get to be more cooperative with us in Afghanistan and elsewhere.

So my views, and I say this respectfully to my friend from Illinois here, I think it was wrong to say what he did in that matter. I think it is important for us to be very careful about the language we use; make it clear that if this United States is going to build relationships around the world, we’re going to have to do so with allies — in some cases, allies that we might not particularly like.”

Obama replied by playing the if-you’re-so-smart-and-I’m-so-reckless-why-did-you-vote-to-authorize-the-Iraq-war-while-I-opposed-it card, which seems to benefit him tremendously in fending off the inexperienced-in-foreign-policy argument. 

OBAMA: “Well, look, I find it amusing that those who helped to authorize and engineer the biggest foreign policy disaster in our generation are now criticizing me… (APPLAUSE) … for making sure that we are on the right battlefield and not the wrong battlefield in the war against terrorism (APPLAUSE).

Chris, respectfully — and you and I are close friends — but the fact is: You obviously didn’t read my speech. Because what I said was that we have to refocus, get out of Iraq, make certain that we are helping Pakistan deal with the problem of Al Qaida in the hills between Afghanistan and Pakistan. But, Chris, if we have actionable intelligence on Al Qaida operatives, including bin Laden, and President Musharraf cannot act, then we should. Now, I think that’s just common sense.”

Olbermann invited Hillary Clinton into the fray. She invoked the rule against hypotheticals. (I’m not sure if there’s ever been a candidate who faithfully obeyed that rule, but it sure comes in handy sometimes to invoke it.)

 CLINTON: “Well, I do not believe people running for president should engage in hypotheticals and it may well be that the strategy that we have to pursue on the basis of actionable intelligence — but, remember, we’ve had some real difficult experiences with actionable intelligence — might lead to a certain action.

But I think it is a very big mistake to telegraph that, and to destabilize the Musharraf regime which is fighting for its life against the Islamist extremists who are in bed with Al Qaida and Taliban.  And remember: Pakistan has nuclear weapons. The last thing we want is to have Al Qaida-like followers in charge of Pakistan and having access to nuclear weapons. So, you can think big, but remember you shouldn’t always say everything you think if you’re running for president, because it has consequences across the world. And we don’t need that right now.

The transcript here indicates the audience was booing Clinton. Is that just because she’s criticizing the hometown candidate (the debate was in Chicago)?

Obama clarified his original statement by emphasizing how hard he would try to make things work with Musharraf before acting unilaterally. And he closed by answering the question of whether he should, as his rivals believe, keep his thoughts on the subject private.

OBAMA: I did not say that we would immediately go in unilaterally. What I said was that we have to work with Musharraf, because the biggest threat to American security right now are in the northwest provinces of Pakistan. And that we should continue to give him military aid contingent on him doing something about that.

But the fact of the matter is that when we don’t talk to the American people — we’re debating the most important foreign policy issues that we face, and the American people have the right to know. It is not just Washington insiders that are part… (APPLAUSE) … of the debate that has to take place with respect to how we’re going to shift our foreign policy.”

Here, courtesy of the Chicago Sun-Times, is the full transcript for the truly obsessed. I’ll wait right here till you come back for a final word.

Welcome back. So, if anyone is still with me, what think? Did the rest of the gang catch Obama with his rookie flaw showing? Should we appreciate candidates declining to divulge what they would do, under the no-hypotheticals rule, or the mustn’t-undermine-Musharraf exigency or does the we’re-entitled-know-these-things-before-we-vote rule apply? And did anyone make the case for or against Obama in a way that particularly impressed or irritated you?