Dave Zweifel's Plain Talk: Why al-Qaida's pulling for McCain

Dave Zweifel  —  11/03/2008 5:41 am

Nicholas Kristof, one of the New York Times' op-ed columnists and an expert observer of world trouble spots, remarked last Sunday that al-Qaida has endorsed John McCain for president.

It was a bit of useless information, except for one glaring fact. The terrorist organization that is responsible for causing death and destruction at the World Trade Center and the Pentagon figures that if McCain becomes president, the U.S. will continue George Bush's Iraq policy, thereby making it easier for al-Qaida to recruit more members.

If the American military begins to withdraw from Iraq, a policy favored by Barack Obama, the anti-U.S. sentiment would cool down and the numbers of young men and women willing to blow themselves up for the cause would diminish.

That isn't just Kristof's theory. Richard Clarke, the former White House counterterrorism director, and Joseph Nye, the former chairman of the National Intelligence Council, both said they weren't surprised that al-Qaida prefers McCain.

"From their perspective, a continuation of Bush policies is best for recruiting," Nye said.

"In contrast, an African-American president with a Muslim grandfather and a penchant for building bridges rather than blowing them up would give al-Qaida recruiters fits," the columnist wrote.

Kristof compared the McCain policy of staying in Iraq indefinitely to some of the blunders we've made in other parts of the world, including the catastrophe we know as Vietnam.

There it was an exaggerated fear of communism that led us to a disastrous occupation that tore our own country apart.

Now we have an exaggerated fear of "Islamofascism" that causes us to overreact and damage our own interests, Kristof said. In Somalia, for instance, we became alarmed that an Islamist movement was taking hold among the political factions there, so we jumped in on the side of Ethiopia, giving it a green light to invade. The result has been a humanitarian crisis that some claim is worse than Darfur.

The result has been yet another region furious over U.S. involvement. Islamic militancy and anti-Americanism are rampant, further assisting terrorist recruiters.

McCain, Kristof claims, would amount to four more years of "blindness to nuance in the Muslim world."
And that, he adds, would be a tragedy for Americans.

Dave Zweifel is editor emeritus of The Capital Times. dzweifel@madison.com

Dave Zweifel  —  11/03/2008 5:41 am