A smart reader writes about Barack Obama's comments on terrorism yesterday.
The worst thing about Obama's comment is that he misses the point that even though we put the mastermind of WTC '93 in jail, his uncle was able to pull off a second attack. That's what's wrong with an approach that focuses on punishing the guilty after the fact rather than preventing attacks in the first place.
That's part of what holding people in Guantanamo is all about. It's also the point of questioning them aggressively (without torture) as opposed to reading them their Miranda rights.
In fact, Obama can only make the claim he does about 1993 because the plot basically failed. If they had succeeded as planned to drop one tower on the other, no one would be saying what a wonderful thing it is that Ramzi Yusef is now in jail.
That last point is particularly important. There is a natural -- and dangerous -- tendency to minimize the potential of failed attacks and to write off the plotters as bumblers. (Even though sometimes they are -- as in the 1993 attacks, when Mohamed Salameh was arrested trying to return the rental used in the bombing.) The attackers only look incompetent when the attacks fail to do what the plotters had intended. It is not a good strategy to hope that attacks will fail.
I suspect that the McCain campaign is not going to pound on Obama for this so as to avoid stepping on the message of the day -- energy. The announcement about drilling is important and it's too bad for McCain that the two strong issues happened to come to public attention at the same time. But it would be a mistake to let Obama's comments on terrorism slide. The two men have very different views on terrorism and it will be to McCain's advantage to highlight such differences at every turn.
Not to mention Obama's evident "confusion" on the basic facts surrounding the 1993 attacks. The terrorists were not all incarcerated. Abdul Rahman Yasin fled to Iraq with the assistance of Saddam Hussein's regime and for all we know remains a free man today. Given his party's talking points on Iraq's support for terror -- in essence that there was none -- this oversight is understandable.
UPDATE: The McCain campaign is holding a conference call about Obama's comment at 10AM. Maybe they're taking the issue more seriously than I'd expected. One big question: Will McCain say something about the comments before his speech on energy this afternoon? He should.
