quote in context<\/a><\/i><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\nI think that was one of the points where Kerry lost a lot of credibility. He showed his fundamental lack of understanding of the problem, our enemy or how to prosecute their destruction. It was in fact the exchange that solidified for me everything that has made me uneasy about Kerry – and I felt the *click* that told me I could not in good conscience entrust the safety of this nation to the guy.<\/p>\n
Kerry really believes the way you fight a worldwide and amorphous terrorist movement that is religiously tied to the concept of your complete and utter destruction by only treating the small number of people who bear the name of the group who signed the attack as enemies.<\/p>\n
He is wrong.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
The 9\/11 attacks were ‘signed’ by Al Quida (AQ) – but they did not act alone nor can they and the other groups that make up this widespread terrorist threat operate without the support of nations. Nations that don\u2019t care about the UN, nations that openly practice and support terrorist and genocide. Nations that understand only the concept of force.<\/p>\n
The enemy is more than AQ. The enemy that attacked us was much larger than the men of AQ and the future attacks were going to come from more directions from AQ.<\/p>\n
To concentrate only on slapping down AQ as a reaction to the opening salvo of what is a fight to the death as surely as the Cold War was would be like fighting a cockroach infestation by killing the last one you saw and never going after the places they will run and hide.<\/p>\n
Strategically the occupation of Iraq and the removal of Saddam from play was a good move in this war for a number of reasons… militarily and politically. When a gang of thugs threatens you – when one of them has struck you it is not a bad idea to pick one of the leaders of that gang and beat the shit out of him. The others will hate you more, but some of them will understand to stay the hell out of your way.<\/p>\n
Saddam was a hero and a poster child to the terrorists and the other leaders in the area. He openly defied the US. He openly defied the UN. He openly supported terror and terrorists and was actively in pursuit of the means to help them attack us. Every single day that passed Iraqi bullets were fired at US servicemen. Iraqi misses flew at US planes. Every single day. To imply that Saddam was not part of “The Enemy” that attacked us implies a level of naivet\u00e9 I don\u2019t have any urge to see in our president.<\/p>\n
His attempt at a “zinger” left him looking stupid and petty. Like the rest of his attempts to make Bush look like a drunken cowboy it simply left him looking ridiculous when the Presidents response made it clear that far from being an idiot he had a grasp of the situation – and it was more complex than Kerry seemed to follow.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I wound up posting a response a few minutes ago to a mailing list that was discussing the debate. A member commented about this statement from Kerry, and I figured I’d put my response here as well. I touched it up a bit and reformatted it. “Jim, the president just said something extraordinarily revealing and […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":53142,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"aside","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[278],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/legacyiamsenseiken.local\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2275"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/legacyiamsenseiken.local\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/legacyiamsenseiken.local\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/legacyiamsenseiken.local\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/legacyiamsenseiken.local\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2275"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/legacyiamsenseiken.local\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2275\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/legacyiamsenseiken.local\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/53142"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/legacyiamsenseiken.local\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2275"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/legacyiamsenseiken.local\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2275"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/legacyiamsenseiken.local\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2275"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}