new immigration law has prompted calls from civil rights groups for a boycott of the state’s industries and sports teams

Arizona’s draconian new immigration law has prompted calls from civil rights groups for a boycott of the state’s industries and sports teams . But don’t get too excited. It turns out that the new law is quite popular – and not just in Arizona. Two recent national polls – one by Gallup , the other by CBS – have found that a majority of Americans strongly approve of the state’s immigration crackdown.

In fact, some even some think it doesn’t go far enough. Have Americans become rightwing nuts? Hardly. But Washington’s endless dithering on immigration policy has the whole country at a boiling point. And if Arizonans want to vent their anger, well, bully for them, say voters – including a majority of independents, and even a solid third of Democrats . With the midterm elections just six months away, and Democratic fortunes fading fast, immigration is fast becoming an albatross for Obama.

Egged on by his disaffected Latino base, Obama decided to denounce the Arizona law. But voters obviously don’t agree with him. And Obama has also decided to urge Congress to begin work on comprehensive immigration reform, even though his key GOP ally, Senator Lindsey Graham, a moderate, isn’t playing ball. Graham warned Obama months ago that if he rammed healthcare reform through Congress, he could kiss immigration reform goodbye. Apparently, the president wasn’t listening. And neither was Senate majority leader Harry Reid, who is trailing both of his GOP opponents in the polls, and could well lose his seat this November.

Reid tried to rally Latino voters in Nevada last month by promising that Democrats would try to pass immigration reform this year, even if the GOP won’t help. Apparently, though, Reid forgot to consult with other Democrats. Because it turns out, post-Arizona, that there aren’t enough Democratic votes to pass immigration reform. In fact, Reid may not even be able to get the 50 votes necessary to bring a Democrat-only bill to the Senate floor – let alone secure its passage. What’s Obama to do? Right now, he’s caught between his angry and mobilised Latino base, which is demanding that he push forward with a plan to legalise undocumented immigrants, and mainstream voters, who seem to be leaning toward the GOP’s view that border and workplace enforcement should come first. It’s a recipe for disaster. Many Democrats – and not just Reid – need Latinos and other base groups to turn out in large numbers if they hope to prevail against Republicans this November – and preserve their party’s control of Congress. According to political experts, in some 35 congressional election contests in the West, a high Latino voter turn out could well provide the margin of difference. Also up for grabs, depending on Latino voting, are critical races in high-density Latino states like Florida.

There, a rising GOP star, Marco Rubio, who is Latino, is seeking to win a three-way Senate race in which former GOP Gov. Charlie Crist is running as an independent. On the other hand, there are just as many competitive districts in the South and Midwest where key swing voters overwhelmingly support the new Arizona crackdown, according to polls. Any move by Obama and the Democrats in the direction of legalization – even stepped criticism of Arizona’s new law, perhaps – could well doom Democratic fortunes there. For the GOP, meanwhile, it’s a question of how to balance the short-term political gain of holding out on immigration reform with the potential long-term damage to the party of appearing hostile to Latino aspirations. Everyone knows, Latinos especially, that the Arizona GOP was responsible for the Arizona law. And since many Republicans at the national level have refused to criticize the law, they are not winning any new friends among a key swing constituency they lost in 2008. But most Republicans are calculating that Latinos are just as concerned as mainstream voters about the deficit and the state of the economy – and won’t penalise the GOP for not focusing on immigration before November. And, in fact, like many Democrats, the GOP is also finding itself boxed in by its nativist wing. Just ask Senator John McCain, who has enthusiastically backed the state’s new immigration crackdown because of nativist pressure from GOP challenger, and Tea Party favorite, JD Hayworth. If he hadn’t, he wouldn’t stand a chance of getting re-elected, observers say. With only a narrow legislative window remaining – Congress takes a break on May 28, and when it returns, candidates start ginning up their election campaigns – serious action on immigration is unlikely. Reid, already under fire from the GOP for his grand-standing on immigration, has promised to focus on an energy, bill first and foremost.

Obama, meanwhile, recently took advantage of the annual White House “Cinco de Mayo” celebration to say that he still hoped that Congress would “start work” on immigration this year. In the game of verbal inches that often passes for Washington politics, that statement was taken as a positive sign. Of what, though, no one’s exactly sure.

Barack Obama's national security team singled out one man from its list of most-wanted terrorists, Baitullah Mehsud,leader of the Pakistani Taliban

WASHINGTON In the early months of his presidency, President Barack Obama’s national security team singled out one man from its list of most-wanted terrorists, Baitullah Mehsud, the ruthless leader of the Pakistani Taliban. He was to be eliminated.Mehsud was Pakistan’s public enemy No. 1 and its most feared militant, responsible for a string of bombings and assassination attempts. But while Mehsud carried out strikes against U.S. forces overseas and had a $5 million bounty on his head, he had never been the top priority for U.S. airstrikes, something that at times rankled Pakistan.”The decision was made to find him, to get him and to kill him,” a senior U.S. intelligence official said, recalling weeks and months of “very tedious, painstaking focus” before an unmanned CIA aircraft killed Mehsud in August at his father-in-law’s house near Pakistan’s border with Afghanistan.

It was not the first airstrike on Obama’s watch, but it marked the first major victory in his war on terrorism, a campaign the administration believes can be waged even more aggressively than its predecessor’s. Long before he went on the defensive in Washington for his handling of the failed Christmas Day airline bombing, Obama had widened the list of U.S. targets abroad and stepped up the pace of airstrikes.Advances in spy plane technology have made that easier, as has an ever-improving spy network that helped locate Mehsud and other terrorists. These would have been available to any new president. But Obama’s counterterrorism campaign also relies on two sharp reversals from his predecessor, both of which were political gambles at home.Obama’s national security team believed that the president’s campaign promise to pull U.S. troops out of Iraq would have a side benefit: freeing up manpower and resources to hunt terrorists in Pakistan and Afghanistan. Intelligence officials, lawmakers and analysts say that approach is showing signs of success.

Obama also has sought to reach out to Islamic allies and tone down U.S. rhetoric, a language shift that critics have argued revealed a weakness, in an effort to win more cooperation from countries like Yemen and Pakistan.For example, though Pakistan officially objects to U.S. airstrikes within its border, following the Mehsud strike, the U.S. has seen an increase in information sharing from Pakistani officials, which has helped lead to other strikes, according to the senior law enforcement official. He and other current and former officials spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive security matters.Pakistan’s cooperation is key to U.S. counterterrorism efforts because much of the best intelligence still comes from Pakistan’s intelligence agency. Ensuring that cooperation has been a struggle for years, in part because Pakistan wants greater control over the drone strikes and its own fleet of aircraft, two things the U.S. has not allowed.

“The efforts overseas are bearing fruit,” said Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., a strident critic of Obama’s domestic counterterrorism policies who said Obama has at times shown himself even more aggressive than Bush in his use of force overseas. “I give them generally high marks for their efforts to capture and kill terrorists in Pakistan, and they’re pushing the envelope in Yemen.”CIA drones, the remote-controlled spy planes that can hunt terrorists from miles overhead, are responsible for many of the deaths. Drone strikes began increasing in the final months of the Bush administration, thanks in part to expanded use of the Reaper, a newer generation aircraft with better targeting systems and greater, more accurate firepower.

Obama has increased their use even further. A month after Mehsud’s death, drone strikes in Pakistan killed Najmiddin Jalolov, whose Islamic Jihad Union claimed responsibility for bombings in 2004 at U.S. and Israeli embassies in Uzbekistan. Senior al-Qaida operatives Saleh al-Somali and Abdallah Sa’id were killed in airstrikes in December. And Mehsud’s successor at the Pakistani Taliban, Hakimullah Mehsud, died following an attack last month.Intelligence officials and analysts say the drawdown of troops in an increasingly stable Iraq is part of the reason for the increase in drone strikes. The military once relied on drones for around-the-clock surveillance to flush out insurgents, support troops in battle and help avoid roadside bombs.

With fewer of those missions required, the U.S. has moved many of those planes to Afghanistan, roughly doubling the size of the military and CIA fleet that can patrol the lawless border with Pakistan, officials said.”These tools were not Obama creations, but he’s increased their use and he has shifted the U.S. attention full front to Afghanistan,” said Thomas Sanderson, a defense analyst and national security fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.The Obama administration has also benefited from stepped-up cooperation with officials in Osama bin Laden’s ancestral homeland of Yemen. Authorities there killed 30 suspected militants in airstrikes in December closely coordinated with U.S. intelligence agencies.

Yemen has had a sometimes rocky relationship with the U.S. and was perceived to have an on-again-off-again approach to fighting terrorism, but officials in Washington are cautiously optimistic about a newly strengthened relationship.Abdullah al-Saidi, Yemen’s ambassador to the United Nations, said his country has always been committed to fighting terrorism. But in a fragmented country beset by a growing al-Qaida presence, a rebellion in the north and a secessionist movement in the south, it wasn’t always easy for the government to openly align with the United States.Washington is trying to make it easier with the promise of more money. But perhaps more important, al-Saidi said, were overtures such as Obama’s June 2009 speech in Cairo, where he sought a “new beginning” with the Muslim world.

Obama has also abandoned terms like “radical Islam” and “Islamo-fascism,” rhetoric that was seen as anti-Muslim by many in the Arab world and which al-Saidi said made it harder for governments to openly cooperate with Washington.”Just the notion of not equating Islam with terrorism, there is a lot of good will toward him,” al-Saidi said. “For the public, it’s easier to say, ‘Well, it’s no longer a hostile power as it used to be.'”Such international successes have largely been drowned out by the controversy that followed the failed bombing of a Detroit-bound airliner on Christmas. When the FBI read suspected bomber Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab his rights and charged him in federal court, Republicans accused Obama of not understanding the country is at war.

“They’re trying to be tougher than Bush overseas but different from Bush at home,” Graham said. “It doesn’t make a lot of sense. They really got the right model for Pakistan and Yemen, but they’re really tone deaf at home.”After Obama missed his own deadline to close the prison for terrorist suspects at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and backtracked on a plan to prosecute 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed in a New York courthouse, Republicans saw the Detroit case as an opportunity to renew questions about Obama’s national security credentials, Republican strategist Kevin Madden said.Madden said that Obama’s stepped-up strategy overseas doesn’t resonate with voters, and Republicans gain little in an election year by acknowledging where they agree with the White House strategy.

“National security politics is driven by events more than it’s driven by long-term trends,” he said.Or, as Graham put it: “What resonates with people is what happens in Detroit, more than what happens on the Afghanistan-Pakistan border.”The White House says it see no conflict between broadening the attacks overseas and sticking with the U.S. judicial system at home, where hundreds of people have been convicted on terrorism charges since the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.”The president believes that we need to use all elements of American power to defeat al-Qaida, including the strength of our military, intelligence, diplomacy and American justice,” White House spokesman Ben Rhodes said. “We only weaken ourselves when we fail to use our full arsenal.”(AP)