After George Bush invaded Iraq, it could be said that al Qaeda had him right where they wanted him: Entangled in the occupation of a country whose culture he could not fathom, wasting U.S. blood and treasure at an unconscionable rate in order to secure Iraq’s oil for U.S. and multinational corporations, undermining American credibility as an honest broker in the Middle East for generations to come and immolating world peace on the bonfire of his own vanities.
“[A terror strike] will push the Americans deliberately to vote for McCain so that he takes revenge for them against al-Qaeda. Al-Qaeda then will succeed in exhausting America.”
– Alleged al Qaeda member
Given all that, it shouldn’t come as a surprise that the Washington Post reported yesterday that al Qaeda has endorsed John McSame:

“Al-Qaeda will have to support McCain in the coming election,” said a commentary posted Monday on the extremist Web site al-Hesbah, which is closely linked to the terrorist group. It said the Arizona Republican would continue the “failing march of his predecessor,” President Bush…

In language that was by turns mocking and ominous, the newest posting credited al-Qaeda with having lured Washington into a trap that had “exhausted its resources and bankrupted its economy.” It further suggested that a terrorist strike might swing the election to McCain and guarantee an expansion of U.S. military commitments in the Islamic world.

“It will push the Americans deliberately to vote for McCain so that he takes revenge for them against al-Qaeda,” said the posting, attributed to Muhammad Haafid, a longtime contributor to the password-protected site. “Al-Qaeda then will succeed in exhausting America.”

The McCain campaign — which has gleefully used the fictitious story that a Hamas official endorsed Barack Obama in fundraising appeals — was outraged over the Post’s report:

Randy Scheunemann, McCain’s top foreign-policy adviser, questioned why the WaPo would run the story in the form it did, with what he called an “inflammatory” headline: “On al Qaeda web site, joy over U.S. crisis, support for McCain.”

He also suggested the WaPo cherry-picked information, implying that it was an anti-McCain hatchet job. Scheunemann said:

“Now The Washington Post can explain why it used the quotes it did. Minimal perusing of the same website they quoted finds many, many other quotations including one which says quote, ‘regardless of who wins the election, the old man or the climber, I inform you it will be dealt with according to your policies towards the land of Islam and Muslims.’ So they had many alternative postings that they could have chosen to write about but they obviously chose one, for whatever reasons, wherever they found it, why ever they did it, to create an inflammatory headline that is not even supported by its own story and certainly not supported by a full reading of the Post.

Of course, the quote from Hamas about Obama that Scheunemann and company used in their fundraising was even less an endorsement than the source cited by the post. Quoting from Carl Cameron at Fox News:

[Hamas political adviser Ahmed] Yousef said in the interview: “We don’t mind — actually we like Mr. Obama. We hope he will [win] the election and I do believe he is like John Kennedy, great man with great principle, and he has a vision to change America to make it in a position to lead the world community but not with domination and arrogance.”

The fact is, al Qaeda knows that its survival depends on continuing the policy of George Bush, as John McCain would do, of deploying the U.S. military against them, a strategy that has been likened to using a chainsaw to perform an appendectomy.

In fact, a recent study from RAND, a right-leaning thinktank based in Santa Monica, showed that using the military is the least effective strategy for defeating terror groups:

“[The U.S. military] should generally resist being drawn into combat operations in Muslim countries where its presence is likely to increase terrorist recruitment.” and recommended, “ending the notion of a ‘war’ on terrorism” and “Moving away from military references would indicate that there was no battlefield solution to countering terrorism.” In conclusion the RAND study advised: “By far the most effective strategy against religious groups has been the use of local police and intelligence services, which were responsible for the end of 73 percent of [terrorist] groups since 1968.”

Under Pres. Obama, if the United States were to join with other nations to use intelligence and law enforcement to run al Qaeda to ground, al Qaeda’s days would be numbered, and its leadership knows that.