If this isn’t a sign of a huge foreign policy blunder I don’t know what is.  Read parts of the following article about Pakistan.

Democrats have said for a few years now that it’s time to use covert actions to get the enemy, that the military can’t be used for every fight.  And for saying those things, they’ve been ridiculed and called weak in defense.  

Now we see President Bush, Dick Cheney, John McCain and the Republicans also believe covert actions (police actions) can work and should be used.  And now they agree that we’ve had an over reliance of military action.

    PESHAWAR, Pakistan - Frustrated by repeated dead ends in the search for Osama bin Laden, U.S. and Pakistani officials said they are questioning long-held assumptions about their strategy and are shifting tactics to intensify the use of the unmanned but lethal Predator drone spy plane in the mountains of western Pakistan.

    The number of Hellfire missile attacks by Predators in Pakistan has more than tripled, with 11 strikes reported by Pakistani officials this year, compared with three in 2007.

    There has been no confirmed trace of bin Laden since he narrowly escaped from the CIA and the U.S. military after the battle near Tora Bora, Afghanistan, in December 2001, according to U.S., Pakistani and European officials...

    In interviews, the officials attributed their failure to find bin Laden to an over reliance on military force, disruptions posed by the war in Iraq and a pattern of underestimating the enemy....

    "Iraq was a fundamental wrong turn. That was the most strategically negative action that was taken," said John O. Brennan, a former deputy executive director of the CIA and a former chief of the National Counterterrorism Center.  "The collective effort in the government required to go after an individual like bin Laden -- the Iraq campaign consumed that."...

    More recently, the search has been hobbled by a tattered relationship between the United States and Pakistan. CIA and U.S. military officials said cooperation is so bad that they now withhold intelligence about the suspected whereabouts of al-Qaeda commanders out of fear that the Pakistanis might tip them off...

    U.S. officials said they have drafted several covert missions since 2005 that would have dispatched teams of Navy SEALs and the Army's Delta Force into Pakistan after receiving intelligence on individual al-Qaeda leaders, though not bin Laden. But most of the raids were canceled or failed to receive high-level approval...

Finally, Democrats and Barack Obama are being vindicated for their efforts to get to the truth of the matter.

Many of us have advocated using covert actions instead of invading nations like Iraq, only to be made fun of or called weak and chickenhawks.  Well - it appears a little BRAIN work comes in handy sometimes.

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