Last Straw

Spen­cer Ack­er­man on a con­fer­ence call held by the McCain cam­paign:

I just got off a con­fer­ence call held by the McCain cam­paign to deny that Al Qaeda … is root­ing for their man. To describe the call as pan­icked would be an understatement.

What was absent from the call, oddly enough, was any dis­cus­sion about why Al Qaeda might want McCain to win. And there the case is simple enough. Al Qaeda prefers an indef­in­ite U.S. occu­pa­tion of Iraq and a bel­li­cose U.S. all across the Muslim world to rad­ic­al­ize Muslims to its ter­ror­ist cause and drain the U.S. of its fin­an­cial wealth — what Osama bin Laden calls his “bleed to bank­ruptcy” strategy. Hence, the reason why, as the CIA even­tu­ally con­cluded, Bin Laden tried to help George W. Bush’s reelec­tion in 2004 by releas­ing a late-October tape. McCain pledges basic con­tinu­ity with Bush on the Iraq war. As Sch­eun­e­mann put it, “John McCain will spend what it takes to win.”

External links:

• On Al-Qaeda Web Sites, Joy Over U.S. Crisis, Sup­port for McCain | 23 Octo­ber, 2008