Let me be clear: as a citizen, and as President, I believe that Muslims have the same right to practice their religion as anyone else in this country. That includes the right to build a place of worship and a community center on private property in lower Manhattan, in accordance with local laws and ordinances," Obama said.
"This is America, and our commitment to religious freedom must be unshakeable."
Speaking to reporters today, President Obama drew a sharp line under his comments last night, insisting that his defense of the right to build a mosque does not mean he supports the project.
"I was not commenting and I will not comment on the wisdom of making the decision to put a mosque there. I was commenting very specifically on the right people have that dates back to our founding," he said.
Obama's new stance is logically consistent with his words last night, if a bit less "clarion," as Mike Bloomberg called the first remarks. And there are certainly two possible stances here: Bloomberg's, that the Cordoba project itself represents the best of America; and Obama's, that the freedom of religion is an important American value.
Obama's new remarks, literally speaking, re-open the question of which side he's on. Most of the mosque's foes recognize the legal right to build, and have asked the builders to reconsider.
Osama bin Laden has just got to be tickled pink. For a moment there, he was probably worried. It almost sounded like Obama was going to turn a corner and start rebuilding trust in the Islamic Middle East--trust that had dramatically eroded in the past year:
But now haters everywhere can breath a sigh of relief. The great champion of tolerance is cutting them all the slack they could possibly wish for. He's not going to wage any sort of grand campaign on behalf of mutual respect and tolerance, so violent extremists on all sides--and their supporters--will be free to run amok and destroy any chance of peace breaking out.
You see, the folks behind Cordoba House are precisely the sort of Moslems that al Qaeda wants to destroy (Chris Martinez via digby):
[T]he Cordoba House is deliberately, expressly, and unequivocally intended to stand for the diametric opposite of what the 9/11 attackers believed. It would stand for inclusion, reconciliation, and understanding across faiths and cultures. In fact, in many ways, the Muslim founders of the Cordoba House (and its imam) are the sorts of Muslims that bin Laden and his adherents hate most. They are cosmopolitan and modern. The Cordoba House itself will contain many earthly luxuries and pleasures. Its founders (and location) actively embrace multicultural, multi-sectarian, quintessentially modern New York City, and many of its proponents have happily lived in Southern Manhattan for decades.
The Cordoba House, in other words, is not only separate and distinct from the identity and ideology of al Qaeda and the 9/11 terrorists, it is a direct repudiation ("refudiation," for Sarah Palin) of them.
Of course it goes without saying that every war we fight--in Iraq, in Afghanistan, in Yemen, in Ethiopa, in The Sudan, wherever--will only make things worse, particularly when we make deals with strongmen (or wannabes) and spurn those--like the backers of Cordoba House--who have a far, far better understanding of what makes America great than we do ourselves.
So, way to go, anti-principle man! You're doing a much better job of fighting George Bush's self-destructive wars than Bush himself could ever have done.
Obama and Company are gearing up for an explanation tour of our goals in the Middle East... that we are there to keep Al Qaeda out, to stop the Taliban from returning to Afghanistan, and to WIN (whatever that means).
Trying to build a Democratic state in a Medieval mess is just not working out. Keeping the corrupt Karzai government afloat is a form of creeping suicide for our troops, which we have expanded in Afghanistan as we have cut them in Iraq.
This has been so fricken obvious since before day one. It was obvious when al Qaeda killed hundreds of Moslems in the 1998 embassy bombings. And finally someone with the right credentials to be listened to is saying it. From Rachel Maddow's 2-16-10 transcript:
ANNOUNCER: Today's security briefing will be conducted by Malcolm Nance, retired naval intelligence officer, fluent in Arabic, has been posted all over the Middle East, South Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa. He was an instructor at the U.S. Navy Survival Evasion, Resistance and Escape School. He helped create the advanced terrorism abduction and hostage survival school.
His specialty: Middle Eastern terrorism.
His assessment of the enemy: al Qaeda is a cult.
Its ideology is a dramatic corruption of traditional Islam. Doctrine is based on destroying and reengineering Islam.
Plan of attack: code name, "Circuit Breaker," a mind war to separate al Qaeda from its base of support.
Expected outcome: total defeat of al Qaeda within 24 months.
The failure to challenge al Qaeda ideologically is dramatically different from the Cold War. One might question how we challenged the Soviets ideologically, but there's no doubt that we did challenge them. This time, not so much. One reason, I would argue, is because their extremist religious ideology is so close to that of Bush's base--which even Obama is afraid to challenge to directly. So we don't even come close to going there. But whether you buy my explanation or not (and as a deep believer in multiple causation, I only offer that as the most important influence, not the only one), it's surely true that we've done virtually nothing to challenge al Qaeda ideologically, and that's a very, very stupid way to fight a group that has so little in the way of military material, and that's so dependent on trying to leverage its ideas.
There's just one problem with Nance's ideas: There much too reality-based to have much of a chance in getting a foothold with Versailles. As Greg Sargent noted this week, "Congressional Dems Have No Message On National Security; Getting Badly Outworked By GOP". The fact that the GOP's message is batshit crazy makes no difference whatsoever. It's a consistent, insistent, disciplined message delivered over, and over, and over again, with deadly military precision. Plus, it sounds tough! And if you can't be effective, be tough, right?
There is key information missing in General Stanley McChrystal's recipe to reform U.S. detentions in Afghanistan. The plan, part of the General's 66-page assessment published by the Washington Post, outlines a strategy to turn over "all detention operations in Afghanistan ... to the Afghan government once they have developed the requisite sustainable capacity to run those systems properly." This is the correct objective for the United States, but some of the ingredients for achieving it need to be filled in.
I just heard a local radio interview with John Mueller, Professor of Political Science at Ohio State, who made the clearest presentation I've heard to date about the baselessness of Obama's rationale for fighting in Afghanistan. There's no transcript, and even the sound file won't go up for a few hours at best, but fortunately Mueller has just published a piece at Foreign Affairs online making the same case in very similar terms. It begins:
How Dangerous Are the Taliban?
Why Afghanistan Is the Wrong War John Mueller
George W. Bush led the United States into war in Iraq on the grounds that Saddam Hussein might give his country's nonexistent weapons of mass destruction to terrorists. Now, Bush's successor is perpetuating the war in Afghanistan with comparably dubious arguments about the danger posed by the Taliban and al Qaeda.
President Barack Obama insists [1] that the U.S. mission in Afghanistan is about "making sure that al Qaeda cannot attack the U.S. homeland and U.S. interests and our allies" or "project violence against" American citizens. The reasoning is that if the Taliban win in Afghanistan, al Qaeda will once again be able to set up shop there to carry out its dirty work. As the president puts it [2], Afghanistan would "again be a base for terrorists who want to kill as many of our people as they possibly can." This argument is constantly repeated but rarely examined; given the costs and risks associated with the Obama administration's plans for the region, it is time such statements be given the scrutiny they deserve.
US airstrikes in Afghanistan like the one that killed over 100 civilians last week have reached all-time destructive highs. According to Air Forces Central, US warplanes dropped a record 438 bombs in Afghanistan during April. The number of dropped bombs has increased steadily over the past few months, and just yesterday, Gen. James Jones claimed the US will continue conducting airstrikes despite President Karzai's admonishment that these bombings are counterproductive, turning Afghan civilians against the United States. Yet as the situation in Afghanistan and Pakistan continues to deteriorate, Congress will decide this week whether to approve $94.2 billion in supplemental wartime spending.
Veterans of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan like retired Corporal Rick Reyes are meeting with members of Congress early this week, urging them not to approve this massive supplemental wartime funding bill until more critical questions are answered about the war. We still don't know, for instance, how the Obama administration intends to prevent increases in US airstrikes and military presence from becoming recruiting tools for Taliban extremists or al Qaeda terrorists. We still don't know how the administration will be able to stop military escalation from further destabilizing a nuclear-armed Pakistan. Nor has the administration been forthright about benchmarks or an exit strategy, or whether funding more war will hamper US economic recovery.
Richard Clarke former head of the National Security Council's office of counter-terrorism, has predicted that based on Al Qaeda's long history of attempting to manipulate European and US elections, we could expect some kind of stepped-up campaign to begin soon. Also check out what Mark Green had to say about the prospect of a terrorist intervention in the presidential election, and what we should do about it.
CAIRO, Egypt - An American member of al-Qaida pointed to economic troubles in the United States as proof that "the enemies of Islam" face defeat, in an English-language video released Saturday.
In a half hour video message, California-native Adam Gadahn urged Pakistanis to unite against their government and U.S. forces, and taunted Americans over their economic crisis, relating it to their military interventions.
"The enemies of Islam are facing a crushing defeat, which is beginning to manifest itself in the expanding crisis their economy is experiencing," said Gadahn, in a clip of the message distributed by the SITE Intelligence Group, a Washington-based monitor of militant Web sites.
"A crisis whose primary cause, in addition to the abortive and unsustainable crusades they are waging in Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Iraq, is their turning their backs on Allah's revealed laws, which forbid interest-bearing transactions, exploitation, greed and injustice in all its forms."
Gadahn, 29, grew up in Riverside County, east of Los Angeles. He was indicted by a federal grand jury in Santa Ana in 2005 and charged with one count of treason and two counts of providing material support to a designated foreign terrorist organization.
The FBI says Gadahn moved to Pakistan in 1998 and attended an al-Qaida training camp six years later, serving as a translator and consultant.
Gadahn also urged Pakistanis to unite and establish an Islamic state. Al-Qaida's media arm, al-Sahab, is increasingly using English-language videos to address Muslims in Pakistan who are unlikely to speak Arabic.
Richard Clarke, former National Security Council national coordinator for security and counterterrorism, writes on the history of Al Qaeda attempting to manipulate elections in Europe and the US with well-timed attacks and videos. He then concludes that for the current US election:
At the very least, expect another Halloween video from the scary man in the cave.
What would be the purpose of any attempted manipulation of the U.S. election? It could just be to use the election to magnify the media coverage of their terrorist activities, make al Qaeda look even more capable than it is, and remind everyone they are still around. Such a media-amplified attack might help them with recruitment and fundraising. Even more likely is the possibility that al Qaeda would hope the attack would benefit John McCain. Opinion polls, which, as noted above, al Qaeda reads closely, suggest that an attack would help McCain. Polls in Europe and the Middle East also suggest an overwhelming popular support there for Barack Obama. Al Qaeda would not like it if there were a popular American president again.
