Democratic nominee, Barack Obama, in his convention speech, hit his republican rival, John McCain, on his cynical support of Bush's opportunistic blundering: "McCain likes to say that he'll follow Bin Laden to the gates of Hell -- but he won't even go to the cave where he lives."
In a late night discussion Wednesday, Obama told David Letterman that, "I think we would have tamped down Al Qaeda, we could have, if not captured or killed Bin Laden, at least made sure that they weren't’t setting up the kind of base camps that have now reconstituted themselves, so they’ve got safe haven in the mountains between Pakistan and Afghanistan.
"Bin Laden and Al Qaeda, they are on the Pakistani side of the border, we were funding this guy Musharraf, providing him $10 billion in military assistance, and they were not going after these folks that are sitting there hatching plots to attack the United States again. And, you know, one of the things that we’ve got to recognize is that if we are protecting dictators because we think that’s the best we can do, we’re actually creating an environment in Pakistan that becomes anti-American and feeds the kinds of militancy that can end up damaging us badly,” said Obama.
"The struggle against Islamic-based terrorism will be not simply a military campaign but a battle for public opinion in the Islamic world, among our allies & in the US. Osama bin Laden understands that he cannot defeat the US in a conventional war," Obama wrote, in his book, 'Audacity of Hope.' "What he & his allies can do is inflict enough pain to provoke a reaction of the sort we've seen in Iraq--a botched & ill-advised US military incursion into a Muslim country, which in turn spurs on insurgencies based on religious sentiment & nationalist pride, which in turn necessitates a lengthy & difficult US occupation. All of this fans anti-American sentiment among Muslims, & increases the pool of potential terrorist recruits.
That's the plan for winning a war from a cave, & so far, we are playing to script. To change that script, we'll need to make sure that any exercise of American military power helps rather than hinders our broader goals: to incapacitate the destructive potential of terrorist networks and win this global battle of ideas," Obama wrote.
In this presidential election, we have a choice between a Democrat who has pledged to actually change the course of the military follies of the last eight years and work to repair the damage done, running against a protege' and enthusiast of every instance of Bush's posterior-covering diversion as he and his mentor insist on urging us "listen to the words of the enemy" they've let run free and allowed "safe haven".
Instead listening to the American people, John McCain is promising to continue the lame-duck militarist's Iraq folly into infinity, ensuring the original 9-11 suspects continue to enjoy whatever "safe haven" they've taken advantage of in Pakistan/Afghanistan since Bush and his enablers turned their backs on them in favor of pursuing their Iraq prize. Even as the two nominees stand together today on yet another sad anniversary of the 9-11 attacks, they stand miles apart in their respective determination to either exploit the crime and escalate the animosity behind the attacks, or, to bring the suspects to justice and heal the divisions caused by the fleeing administration's blustering aggression.
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