The GOP establishment is apparently getting worried about Huckabee. They had Robert Novak, one of their best hatchet men, to do a character assassination piece in the Washington Post today.

Well you know what they say, there really is nothing quite like threatening an ally with an act of war for getting one's diplomatic agenda off on the right foot. Or, wait. Maybe it was: There's really nothing quite like threatening an ally with acts of war when you want to prove you've got as much prove-you're-a-man juice in your foreign bone as any woman does. Yeah, I think that was it. The second one.

Tactlessness is often defined as stating what every one in the room is thinking.

This is what Obama did by making it explicit that he would take military action in Pakistan over Musharrif's objections. He thus publicly affronted Pakistan's sovereignity and showed disrepect for Musharrif at a time when the situation was very unstable there. Not surprisingly Obama ended on the front pages of the Pakistani newspapers damaging the United States' standing with the people of Pakistan.

Further, stating this explicitly removes an element of deniability from the Paksitani government. If they give us usable intelligence and we conduct a military action everyone in Pakistan will blame those who shared the information with the United States.

These are and were easily forseeable consequences and were blamed at the time on Obama's inexperience. Given that he majored in International Relations at Columbia University he should have known better than to treat an honor based society in this manner. Obama may be inherently brash.

Now that the damage is done, other politicians are stating the same policy publicly although in the part of his remarks reported above Huckabee does not explicitly state that this would be done over Pakistan's objections.

Pakistan has since shown that it is indeed unstable. Often, the upper classes are very poor at estimating the appeal of an insurgency to the lower classes. In the last election the Islamic parties claimed 16%. They are just recovering from the prior requirement that in order to run for Parliment you had to have a univeristy degree. In order to draw the Muslims into the democratic system this had recently be changed to allow the possession of a degree from the Madrassa system to count. If the Sunni and Shia mainstream politicians split the vote, the Islamic Fundamentalists could obtain considerable power.

Claims that the army would keep the situation safe are also dubious. Some 250 soldiers surrendered rather than fight their brother Muslims.

We need more tact and more forsight than Obama has shown so far in an area where he should have had more expertise.

We need more tact and more forsight than Obama has shown

you mean wait a few months and then say the exact same thing? what leadership, hillary!