New York Times article and my response: al qaeda endorses McCain...

[zachor_ve_kavod]

This article was sent to me by my leftist cousin.  The light is on but nobody's home.  Below is the article from the NY Times.  Below that is my response.

Op-Ed Columnist
The Endorsement From Hell
 

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By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF
Published: October 25, 2008
John McCain isn’t boasting about a new endorsement, one of the very, very few he has received from overseas. It came a few days ago:

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Fred R. Conrad/The New York Times
Nicholas D. Kristof
 
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“Al Qaeda will have to support McCain in the coming election,” read a commentary on a password-protected Islamist Web site that is closely linked to Al Qaeda and often disseminates the group’s propaganda.

The endorsement left the McCain campaign sputtering, and noting helplessly that Hamas appears to prefer Barack Obama. Al Qaeda’s apparent enthusiasm for Mr. McCain is manifestly not reciprocated.

“The transcendent challenge of our time [is] the threat of radical Islamic terrorism,” Senator McCain said in a major foreign policy speech this year, adding, “Any president who does not regard this threat as transcending all others does not deserve to sit in the White House.”

That’s a widespread conservative belief. Mitt Romney compared the threat of militant Islam to that from Nazi Germany or the Soviet Union. Some conservative groups even marked “Islamofascism Awareness Week” earlier this month.

Yet the endorsement of Mr. McCain by a Qaeda-affiliated Web site isn’t a surprise to security specialists. Richard Clarke, the former White House counterterrorism director, and Joseph Nye, the former chairman of the National Intelligence Council, have both suggested that Al Qaeda prefers Mr. McCain and might even try to use terror attacks in the coming days to tip the election to him.

“From their perspective, a continuation of Bush policies is best for recruiting,” said Professor Nye, adding that Mr. McCain is far more likely to continue those policies.

An American president who keeps troops in Iraq indefinitely, fulminates about Islamic terrorism, inclines toward military solutions and antagonizes other nations is an excellent recruiting tool. In contrast, an African-American president with a Muslim grandfather and a penchant for building bridges rather than blowing them up would give Al Qaeda recruiters fits.

During the cold war, the American ideological fear of communism led us to mistake every muddle-headed leftist for a Soviet pawn. Our myopia helped lead to catastrophe in Vietnam.

In the same way today, an exaggerated fear of “Islamofascism” elides a complex reality and leads us to overreact and damage our own interests. Perhaps the best example is one of the least-known failures in Bush administration foreign policy: Somalia.

Today, Somalia is the world’s greatest humanitarian disaster, worse even than Darfur or Congo. The crisis has complex roots, and Somali warlords bear primary blame. But Bush administration paranoia about Islamic radicals contributed to the disaster.

Somalia has been in chaos for many years, but in 2006 an umbrella movement called the Islamic Courts Union seemed close to uniting the country. The movement included both moderates and extremists, but it constituted the best hope for putting Somalia together again. Somalis were ecstatic at the prospect of having a functional government again.

Bush administration officials, however, were aghast at the rise of an Islamist movement that they feared would be uncooperative in the war on terror. So they gave Ethiopia, a longtime rival in the region, the green light to invade, and Somalia’s best hope for peace collapsed.

“A movement that looked as if it might end this long national nightmare was derailed, in part because of American and Ethiopian actions,” said Ken Menkhaus, a Somalia expert at Davidson College. As a result, Islamic militancy and anti-Americanism have surged, partly because Somalis blame Washington for the brutality of the Ethiopian occupiers.

“There’s a level of anti-Americanism in Somalia today like nothing I’ve seen over the last 20 years,” Professor Menkhaus said. “Somalis are furious with us for backing the Ethiopian intervention and occupation, provoking this huge humanitarian crisis.”

Patrick Duplat, an expert on Somalia at Refugees International, the Washington-based advocacy group, says that during his last visit to Somalia, earlier this year, a local mosque was calling for jihad against America — something he had never heard when he lived peacefully in Somalia during the rise of the Islamic Courts Union.

“The situation has dramatically taken a turn for the worse,” he said. “The U.S. chose a very confrontational route early on. Who knows what would have happened if the U.S. had reached out to moderates? But that might have averted the disaster we’re in today.”

The greatest catastrophe is the one endured by ordinary Somalis who now must watch their children starve. But America’s own strategic interests have also been gravely damaged.

The only winner has been Islamic militancy. That’s probably the core reason why Al Qaeda militants prefer a McCain presidency: four more years of blindness to nuance in the Muslim world would be a tragedy for Americans and virtually everyone else, but a boon for radical groups trying to recruit suicide bombers.

[my response]

Let me try to adress some of the key points of this article:
 
1.  Kristof quotes McCain's statement, "The transcendent challenge of our time [is] the treat of radical Islamic terrorism" and that "Any president who does not regard this threat as transcending all others does not deserve to sit in the White House."  Kristof then claims that this is a "widespread conservative belief."
 
That islamic terrorism poses a threat that transcends all others is not merely a belief shared by conservatives.  To me, this is a given fact.  I'd wager that most Americans would agree.
 
2.  Al Qaeda, according to Richard Clarke, would support McCain, because he seems to be a continuation of Bush policy, which is better for recruiting. 
 
This actually makes sense.  An appeasing, accomodating president who won't put up much of a fight makes terrorism kind of pointless.  But what is better, to have an active engaged enemy such as al Qaeda plotting and causing terrorism, or a world where al Qaeda is unnecessary because Islam is accepted.  With McCain there will be terrorism, with Obama there will be Sharia.  It's not quite that simple, but you get the idea.
 
3.  Vietnam was a catastrophe because America refused to invade North Vietnam and actually win the war.  There were too many brainwashed children in America who opposed the war and the government lost the will to fight it.  But make no mistake that communism, unlike fascism (which is a nationalized manifestation of socialism) is a global approach to socialism.  The greatest of the human rights abuses in the last century ocurred under a communist regime.
 
4.  I don't know much about the situation in Somalia, but I'm going to look into it.  Kristof seems to be so out to lunch in his previous claims, that it make me want to look into his claim about Somalia before accepting it.
 
5.  The war on terror is a ridiculous idea.  How can you win a war against a tactic?  How can you win a war if you don't even name your enemy?  The war is against radical Islam.  It is radical Islam that seeks global domination.  If you don't believe me, then listen to the imams.  They say it explicitly.
 
There is going to be terrorism in the foreseeable future.  Neither Obama nor McCain will serve as a magic bullet to this problem.  Anyone who says otherwise is a charlatan.  In the long run, the way to eliminate terrorism is to take the fangs out of radical Islam.  The key to doing this, what's going to make the greatest difference in the long run, is to make oil a worthless commodity.  In the meantime, Americans have to be unalterably opposed to any manifestation of Sharia law in the US.