A Dukakis moment: “We can take potentially some action”
Byron York quotes Senator Obama’s strange debate response about a nuclear attack on the United States:
During the debate, moderator Brian Williams…turned to Sen. Barack Obama…“If, God forbid, a thousand times, while we were gathered here tonight, we learned that two American cities had been hit simultaneously by terrorists,” Williams said, “and we further learned beyond the shadow of a doubt it had been the work of al Qaeda, how would you change the U.S. military stance overseas as a result?”…
“Well, first thing we’d have to do is make sure that we’ve got an effective emergency response, something that this administration failed to do when we had a hurricane in New Orleans,” Obama said. “And I think that we have to review how we operate in the event of not only a natural disaster, but also a terrorist attack.”
“The second thing,” Obama continued, “is to make sure that we’ve got good intelligence, A, to find out that we don’t have other threats and attacks potentially out there; and B, to find out do we have any intelligence on who might have carried it out so that we can take potentially some action to dismantle that network.”…
“But what we can’t do is then alienate the world community based on faulty intelligence, based on bluster and bombast,” he said. “Instead, the next thing we would have to do, in addition to talking to the American people, is making sure that we are talking to the international community. Because as has already been stated, we’re not going to defeat terrorists on our own. We’ve got to strengthen our intelligence relationships with them, and they’ve got to feel a stake in our security by recognizing that we have mutual security interests at stake.”
That was it.
“Find out do we have any intelligence on who might have carried it out so that we can take potentially some action to dismantle that network.” Huh? Brian Williams should have put a little more mustard on the hot dog, however. He should have framed the question specifically about a nuclear or other WMD attack — an issue we wrote about at some length. Then perhaps we would have heard responses far weaker than even those of EU figures such as French Presidernt Jacques Chirac.