Sen. Barack Obama delivered a speech on Wednesday in which he outlined his vision for fighting Islamic terrorists. It was a vision full of hindsight, but little foresight.

The senator was quick to remind the audience that he opposed the invasion of Iraq before Congress voted to give President Bush the authority to topple Saddam Hussein. His characterization of that vote -- "Congress became co-author" of the war -- is correct. It is not, as Sen. Hillary Clinton says, "Bush's war." That means, though, that is America's war. And America cannot abandon it to advance the interests of one political party.

Obama, like all other Democratic presidential candidates, would withdraw troops from Iraq straight away. He says he would take the fight to Afghanistan, where the Taliban is resurgent, and if necessary invade Pakistan and wipe out al-Qaida's training camps there. He's right about destroying the camps in Pakistan, and he is bold to say he would do so. Not even John McCain, no shrinking violet, would commit to doing that when we asked him to a few weeks ago.

Obama's rationale for sending U.S. forces into Pakistan to take out al-Qaida is consistent with the Bush Doctrine that America will tolerate no terrorist-exporting camps even if we have to compromise another nation's sovereignty to defend our own. And yet Obama, like all other Democratic candidates, conveniently ignores the inevitable turn of events that would follow a precipitous withdrawal of American troops from Iraq. That is, Iraq would become a failed state from which al-Qaida would export terrorists to attack the United States.

His assertion that our evacuation of Iraq will somehow miraculously allow the Iraqi government to function, providing political and physical security to its people, is contrary to all evidence, which shows that what stability is being purchased in Iraq is bought by our military forces. Obama simply waves away any thought that Iraq might become the new operational haven for al-Qaida if we withdraw and turn our attention to Afghanistan and Pakistan. But his ignoring it does not make it any less likely to happen.

The senator also pretends that the United States has no allies in its fight against Islamic terrorists. He proposes a new strategy for working with other nations to gather intelligence and hunt down terrorists, as if we are not already doing that.

And most naively of all, he posits the thoroughly discredited theory that Islamic extremism is caused by want and an absence of "hope." He spoke of "thousands of desperate faces" in the world's poorest and most unstable countries being exploited by Islamic extremists. His solution? Billions of dollars of foreign aid, of course.

But who attacked the United States on Sept. 11, 2001? It was not poor, starving Africans. It was a group of middle-class, mostly well-educated students and professionals. Who attacked London and Glasgow this summer? Physicians and other medical professionals. Islamic extremism is not the product of poverty.

It is the product of a hate-filled ideology. Throwing money at the poor and uneducated will do nothing to curb its spread.

Sen. Obama has been called naive and inexperienced. After this speech, we would add the modifier "dangerously" to each of those adjectives.