Obama fires back at Clinton with tough talk on national security

Most notably, the Democratic senator from Illinois said he might send U.S. troops into Pakistan to fight terrorists not targeted by Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf.

“If we have actionable intelligence about high-value terrorist targets and President Musharraf won’t act, we will,” Obama said at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington.

The muscular rhetoric came eight days after Obama was branded “irresponsible and frankly naive” by Clinton for saying that as president, he would meet with the leaders of rogue nations without preconditions. Obama later countered that the senator from New York was “irresponsible and naïve” for voting in 2002 to authorize the war in Iraq, which Obama has always opposed. During his speech Wednesday, Obama implicitly renewed his attack on Clinton, his chief rival for the Democratic presidential nomination.

“Congress rubber-stamped the rush to war, giving the president the broad and open-ended authority he uses to this day,” Obama said. “With that vote, Congress became co-author of a catastrophic war.”

Even as he called Clinton overly hawkish, Obama sought to rebut her insinuation that he is overly dovish. To accomplish this balancing act, he promised to withdraw troops from Iraq while beefing up the U.S. presence in Afghanistan.

“I did not oppose all wars,” he said. “I was a strong supporter of the war in Afghanistan. But I said I could not support a dumb war, a rash war in Iraq.”

He added, “I will not hesitate to use military force to take out terrorists who pose a direct threat to America.”

At the same time, Obama refused to back away from last week’s promise to meet with the leaders of rogue nations such as Cuba, North Korea, Syria and Iran.

“Not talking does not work,” he said.

“It’s time to turn the page on Washington’s conventional wisdom that agreement must be reached before you meet.”

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