THE ONE GUY WHO NEVER CARED ABOUT WMD:

Obama Shrinks the War on Terrorism (Peter Beinart, Dec. 07, 2009, TIME)

To understand Barack Obama's Afghanistan decision, it's instructive to go back to one history-shifting sentence, uttered by his predecessor more than eight years ago. It was Sept. 20, 2001. The nation was in agony, and George W. Bush stood before a joint session of Congress, telling Americans where to direct their rage. "Americans are asking, 'Who attacked our country?'" Bush declared early in his remarks. "The evidence we have gathered all points to a collection of loosely affiliated terrorist organizations known as al-Qaeda."

Had Bush stopped there, everything would be different today. But a few minutes later, he made this fateful pivot: "Our war on terror begins with al-Qaeda, but it does not end there." After that, Bush mentioned terror, terrorists or terrorism 18 times more. But he didn't mention al-Qaeda again. When he returned to Congress a few months later for his January 2002 State of the Union address, he cited Hamas, Hizballah, Islamic Jihad, North Korea, Iran and Iraq and employed variations of the word terror 34 times. But he mentioned al-Qaeda only once.

For Obama, this is the original sin whose consequences must now be repaired.

People tend to forget that for W it was about the regimes right from the beginning.

Posted by Orrin Judd at March 10, 2010 6:37 AM