The Audacity of Hope, by Barack Obama: on War & Peace


Barack Obama: We are playing to Osama’s plan for winning a war from a cave

The struggle against Islamic-based terrorism will be not simply a military campaign but a battle for public opinion in the Islamic world, among our allies & in the US. Osama bin Laden understands that he cannot defeat the US in a conventional war. What h & his allies can do is inflict enough pain to provoke a reaction of the sort we’ve seen in Iraq--a botched & ill-advised US military incursion into a Muslim country, which in turn spurs on insurgencies based on religious sentiment & nationalist pride, which in turn necessitates a lengthy & difficult US occupation. All of this fans anti-American sentiment among Muslims, & increases the pool of potential terrorist recruits.

That’s the plan for winning a war from a cave, & so far, we are playing to script. To change that script, we’ll need to make sure that any exercise of American military power helps rather than hinders our broader goals: to incapacitate the destructive potential of terrorist networks and win this global battle of ideas.

Source: The Audacity of Hope, by Barack Obama, p.307 Oct 1, 2006

  • The above quotations are from The Audacity of Hope
    Thoughts on Reclaiming the American Dream    , by Barack Obama.
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