War against terror; the 800 pound gorilla

Washington Times’ Christina Bellantoni writes this morning how the Democrat presidential candidates are doing their best to make the war against terror a non-issue in the campaign;

Six years after the September 11 attacks, the Democrats running for president have drastically different ways of addressing terrorism, with one calling the war on terror a “bumper-sticker slogan.”

Most have avoided the phrase “war on terror” because Democratic primary voters consider it a Republican talking point, but Sens. Hillary Rodham Clinton of New York and Barack Obama of Illinois each have a version.

“Here in New York, nobody needs to tell us that we are in a war against terrorists who seek to do us harm,” Mrs. Clinton said in a foreign-policy address in October.

“The terrorists are at war with us,” Mr. Obama said in a major policy address last month.

As the Democrats’ 2004 vice presidential nominee, former Sen. John Edwards of North Carolina criticized the Bush administration for making “the wrong judgment to turn the focus away from the war on terror and the people who attacked us.”

The closest one to getting it right is Obama – yes, they are at war with us. Too bad we can go to war against them. Edwards, apparently, isn’t even on this planet. If we aren’t killing terrorists in Iraq, then who are we killing? Why is Iran supporting a force of international thugs with training and arms?

If no one is going to hold the Democrats’ feet to the fire on this issue we might just get a president who ignores the threat – like we did before – and just pays off their political connections with taxpayer money. While the threat remains;

Chertoff said the bin Laden tape refuted any notion that al-Qaeda had “lost interest” in attacking Americans on their own soil. “The enemy is not standing still; they are constantly revising their tactics and adapting their strategy and their capabilities,” he said.

Iraq is the central front in the war against terrorists, the folks who want to kill us, whether Democrats want to admit to that or not. Americans are beginning to realize that the Democrats have been fooling us;

The case for cutting and running from Iraq has become untenable in recent months not just substantively but politically as well. Polls show that Americans increasingly believe not only that the surge is working, but also that permanent success in Iraq is possible. So the more intelligent opponents of the war have shied away from the explicit defeatism of Senator Harry Reid’s statement earlier this year that the war is lost. Instead, Democrats like Senators Carl Levin and Jack Reed are seeking to triangulate between the strategy of General David Petraeus and a complete withdrawal. The armchair generals in the Capitol want to find a course that reduces U.S. forces in Iraq rapidly but that (so they claim) does not assure defeat. Triangulation may be harmless in symbolic matters of domestic politics, but it can be dangerous, even fatal, in war.

And from the Times’ story, we can see John Edwards inability to formulate a strategy – Hell, he can’t even admit there’s a war;

He adds in stump speeches an accusation that President Bush uses the “so-called ‘war on terror” ” as an excuse for “trampling on our Constitution, and most perversely, for ignoring the demands of the actual struggle that exists against terrorism.”

Those three thousand people who died about 6 years ago from the moment I’m typing this, wouldn’t call this a “so-called war”. In fact, six years ago from this very money, I stood in the conference room of this very office watching a replay of the second plane hitting the tower, when a column of smoke rose from the Pentagon out the window of the conference room. It wasn’t a “so-called war” then nor is it now. If Democrats can’t formulate an effective strategy – like the one that has kept the rest of us safe in the last six years – they’re not living in the here-and-now. They’re still living in those decadent 90s – when security was the last thing on anyone’s mind – except bin Laden;

“So there is a huge difference between the path of the kings, presidents and hypocritical Ulama (Islamic scholars) and the path of these noble young men,” like al-Shehri, bin Laden said. “The formers’ lot is to spoil and enjoy themselves whereas the latters’ lot is to destroy themselves for Allah’s Word to be Supreme.”

“It remains for us to do our part. So I tell every young man among the youth of Islam: It is your duty to join the caravan (of martyrs) until the sufficiency is complete and the march to aid the High and Omnipotent continues,” he said.

At the end of his speech, bin Laden also mentions the al-Qaida leader in Iraq, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, who was killed in an U.S. air strike there. Al-Zarqawi followed in the footsteps of al-Shehri and his brothers who “fulfilled their promises to God.”

“And now it is our turn,” bin Laden says.

Sounds like it wouldn’t fit on a bumper sticker.

Category: Foreign Policy, Politics, Terror War