hawkish Republican consensus beginning to end

Here is an INTERESTING PIECE in the NY Times about the Republican positions on military use that are emerging so far in this campaign.

It’s the beginning of the end of the homogeneously hawkish stance of most Republicans other than Ron Paul since 2001.

In part this is fatigue with Afghanistan and Iraq, and in part it’s simply that Obama, as the incumbent, has become the owner of the hawkishness.

The interesting thing about the bin Laden raid, politically, is that if there was one issue on which the Obama team was always more hawkish than the Republicans in 2008, it was Pakistan. Obama, Biden, and James Jones had all made public statements about going into Pakistan unilaterally to catch bin Laden, which even McCain was shying away from back then.