london calling
Here's an excerpt from an article in today's Guardian UK on a "rousing stump speech" John Kerry should give now that he's back in the match:
I have said it before, and I will say it again even though my opponents try to smear me as un-American when I do: they have led us into the wrong war against the wrong enemy. When President Bush stood on an aircraft carrier in front of that "Mission Accomplished" banner, he was confusing the battle with the war.They always thought the war could be fought with tanks and aerial bombs. But this is a war of suitcase detonators and car bombs. It is a war we have to fight at home as well as abroad. So I ask you again, do you feel safer with a government that has created a debt so ruinous that it has necessitated cuts in funding for first responders - for our firemen and police; that it has left container ships all but uninspected; our nuclear power stations pitifully vulnerable? My opponents attack me for voting against big-spender weapons programmes, but let me ask you which you would rather have: a properly funded counterterrorist inspection programme operating in our container ports, or billions spent on Star Wars missile defences that have never passed the first tests of reliability and are targeted at enemies that no longer pose a threat?
One thing that gets lost whenever Kerry or his running mate breathlessly point out how they're going to hunt down and kill the terrorists is that the central tenant of any effort to suppress this kind of terrorism - for instance, the al Qaeda kind - must be that it can't be shot at with cruise missles or bombed from planes or rolled over with tanks. It has to be, must be, for the most part, something that resembles law enforcement more than anything. The Brits should know.
<< Home