Jennifer Rubin has already commented on the criticisms from the McCain campaign (which I advise on foreign policy) of Barack Obama for exhibiting a “September 10 mindset.” It’s also worth noting Obama’s response. Here, according to Reuters, is what he had to say:
“These are the same guys who helped engineer the distraction of the war in Iraq at a time when we could have pinned down the people who actually committed 9/11,” Obama said on his campaign plane.
“What they’re trying to do is to do what they’ve done every election cycle, which is to use terrorism as a club to make the American people afraid,” Obama said.
That response is noteworthy on a couple of levels. First, in trying to refute the notion that he has a “September 10 mindset,” Obama actually confirms it by dismissing the threat of terrorism-the No. 1 national security threat we confront today–as a “club” used by Republicans “to make the American people afraid,” presumably for partisan political advantage.
Second, Obama commits a lapse of fact and logic when he blames U.S. commitment in Iraq for our failure to “have pinned down the people who actually committed 9/11.” We did pin done many of the culprits, notably plot mastermind Khalid Sheikh Muhammad, who has now been awarded habeas corpus rights by a Supreme Court decision that Obama applauds. It is true that U.S. forces allowed Osama bin Laden and other top Al Qaeda leaders to escape at Tora Bora in December 2001 because of our unwillingness to put more troops on the ground. (Something that I and others warned of in November 2001, but that I don’t recall Obama commenting on at the time.) And it is true that the Iraq War has drained resources that might otherwise have gone into Afghanistan. But that does not mean that the Iraq War was not worth fighting, or, more importantly, now that we have committed to fighting it that we can withdraw, as Obama suggests, without suffering terrible repercussions.
More to the point, it does not mean that we failed to finish off al Qaeda because we went into Iraq. Our best opportunity to finish off its senior leadership occurred, as previously noted, in December 2001-more than a year before we became embroiled in Iraq. By all accounts Osama bin Laden and Ayman al Zawahiri are now hiding out in the rugged frontier regions of Pakistan. How exactly does Obama think we could have tracked them down if we weren’t in Iraq? Perhaps we could have committed more surveillance technology and more commandos to the task, but we’ve already devoted plenty of resources and we’ve found that all of our ultra-expensive systems are helpless to find two men hiding in a cave. We would increase our odds of success, while of course creating fresh problems, if we sent large numbers of American troops into Pakistan to hunt down bin Laden and Zawahiri as they previously hunted down Saddam Hussein in his rathole in Iraq. Is this what Obama thinks we should have done? Invaded Pakistan rather than invaded Iraq?
That seems unlikely. More likely he is simply repeating clichéd criticisms of the Bush administration whose implications he has not fully digested. During the primary campaign he could expect nothing but adulation for such sentiments from liberal audiences. It will be interesting to see how the rest of the country reacts.
