I’ll get Osama bin Laden, my friends. I’ll get him. I know how to get him.
I’ll get him no matter what and I know how to do it. But I’m not going to telegraph my punches – Senator John McCain
We’ve heard so much from senator John McCain about how he’ll “get Bin Laden”. The question that boggles our minds is why the good senator will not tell our commanders in the field in Afghanistan his secret strategy and save the lives of thousands of our men and women who are being killed in the course of this war. What is wrong with him requesting a private meeting with the president and telling him his plan? Is it possible for senator McCain to put out a policy paper for the Secretary of Defense about how to capture Bin Laden? It has been seven years senator McCain. Why do we have to wait until next January before we capture Bin Laden? Why must it be only when he is the president? For a man who claims to put country first, one would think that should be a top priority. It’s been seven years and our soldiers are still dying in Afghanistan because John McCain will not reveal his secret strategy for capturing or killing Bin Laden. There is a place for politics, and the lives of young American men and women is not it. So unless senator McCain is willing to tell us how to capture and/or kill Bin Laden, he should bloody well shut up.
In the course of this campaign and even as late as in the presidential debate of October 7, 2008, McCain was opposed to the idea of going after Bin Laden in Pakistan if the U.S. military had concrete actionable intelligence about where he was. His narrow worldview keeps conflating a military surgical strike with a military invasion. Perhaps, because of his obsession with wars and bombings, he either does not get it or he is stubbornly against the idea because that may be his “secret” methodology of getting Bin Laden. It is bad enough that we armed the Taliban in the blind ideology-driven policy to use them as a proxy against the Soviets in the middle ofthe cold war. It is even worse that despite our tough rhetoric, we are still allowing them to fund their army with revenue from poppy trade. We have turned a blind eye while Hamid Karzai and his war lords are using our money to enrich themselves while the Afghan people wallow in abject poverty. If McCain knows how to turn this situation around, does he not owe it to the country to help us break the strangle-hold of Bin Laden and his ilk in Afghanistan so we can focus on actually rebuilding the country? Is it not obviou enough that there is no way we can “muddle” through the war in Afghanistan.