Obama: Bad timing for Iraq hearings
Obama said Tuesday he doesn't think the Iraq hearing should have been held around 9/11.
WASHINGTON (CNN) – Democratic presidential contender Barack Obama criticized the timing of Tuesday’s hearings over the future of the Iraq war, because the Illinois senator said it sends the wrong message on the sixth anniversary of the Sept. 11th attacks.
Obama harshly criticized the Bush administration in his statement before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee prior to questioning Gen. David Petraeus and Amb. Ryan Crocker. (Related: Iraqi government dysfunctional, U.S. envoy says)
“I think we should not have had this discussion on 9/11, or 9/10, or 9/12, because I think it perpetuates the notion that the original decision to go into Iraq was directly related to the attacks on 9/11," Obama said.
The Illinois senator added, “I think that some of the frustration you hear from some of the questioners is that we have now set the bar so low that modest improvement in what was a completely chaotic situation, to the point where now we just have the levels of intolerable violence that existed in June of 2006 is considered success, and it's not. This continues to be a disastrous foreign policy mistake. And we are now confronted with the question: How do we clean up the mess and make the best out of a situation in which there are no good options, there are bad options and worse options? And this is not a criticism of either of you gentlemen, this is a criticism of this president and the administration which has set a mission for the military and for our diplomatic forces that is extraordinarily difficult now to achieve.”
Referring to a comment President Bush reportedly made last week, Obama said, “We have the president in Australia suggesting somehow that we are, as was stated before, kicking A-S-S. How can we have a president making that assessment? And it makes it very difficult then for those of us who would like to join with you in a bipartisan way to figure out how to best move forward to extricate this from the day-to-day politics that infects Washington.”
- CNN Political Desk Managing Editor Steve Brusk
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Senator Obama is coming across as someone very presidential. He is showing Americans he has good judgement and good leadership ability to turn a positive new chapter in American history.
Stop whining about the date and ask some tough questions, Professor.
Oh, thats right.., terrorism is not related to the war in Iraq for the dems. No, no relation here...
Hey Obama, try telling that to our boys in uniform while their dodging Al Qaeda in Iraq's terror strikes. (eyes rolling)
Is there any wonder why this guy will never be trusted with America's security?? (eyes still rolling)
Of course that is what the Bush administration is trying to do. They will do anything to link 9/11 to Iraq. Glad Obama is starting to say things that not everyone wants to hear.
The more I hear from this guy the more I like him. He seems to have a realistic view – certainly something that is lacking in the current administration.
Stop whining about the date and ask some tough questions, Professor.
Posted By Jeff Spangler, Arlington, VA : September 11, 2007 4:25 pm
Maybe he did. You just won't know it from reading CNN. 😉
He's right! I still having trouble how is Sep. 11 connected to the Iraq war that had to do with greed about money and oil.
I think that the congress is the one that set the meeting date and time. I mean it is a congressional haring, isn't it? Democrats are in charge of congress, so Barack seems to be compaining about the wrong people.
Obama is really no different from any other 'top tier' politician, republican or democrat. His plan is to just back up and let them fight it out, while still maintaining a presence in the middle east... which is the exact reason why suicide terrorism exists: occupation! We need to seriously rethink our foreign policy and move to a position of non-interventionsim. This radical idea of pre-emptive war needs to be changed...its unconstitutional and unamerican. Vote for Ron Paul in '08, not Obama, who is truly a "washington insider."
This administration is up to it's old tactics,"fear", which they successfully always used. 9/11 victims and families need much more respect than to be used for political gain. I agree with Mr. Obama on this one, and thanks for speaking out.
Our great nation lost both its innocence and innocent American lives on September 11 2001 and to this day continues to lose innocent lives...we are in Iraq as a result. SHAME on you Mr. Obama for trying to make the hearings one more political issue.
One proactive question remains to be put forth: What happens if -in the best case senario – a year or two down the line, Iraq is free enough from sectarian strife for the U.S to significantly "draw down?" It will then (as now) take only a very small band of mal-contented Sunnis, Shia or Islamists to bomb another mosque, murder civilians or even criticize the other side, and the Iraqi conflagration starts anew. There IS no plausible "end game."
WOW, THIS MAN HAS IT ALL! HE IS CLEAR, FOCUSED, ARTICULATE, AND COMMANDING.
I agree that the hearings held can definitely be seen as associated with the 9/11 attacks. Even Bush himself admitted that there was not real connection and Petraeus said after he hearings that he does not believe the United States is any safer after the effort in Iraq.
What a great question to ask. Iraq has nothing to do with 911. Bush, Clinton and Chenny wants the world to think Obama always impresses me with his leadership. Obama 08!
Well, at least I was not the only person who noticed the strange timing of this event. Thanks Barack.
Obama says, "This continues to be a disastrous foreign policy mistake. "
Riiight. And nuking Pakistan would be the SMART approach to getting OBL, Mr Obama? Perhaps you need another cigarette to take the pressure off.
Professorial? yes...the class won't booth him out.
Senatorial? hm...not quite yet...too rough for seasoned experts.
Presidential? Well...I am not so sure that any heads of state will like the lecturing.
Hey James, Obama never said anything about nuking Pakistan. Those were the words put into his mouth by Republican spinsters, just like you're doing now. Way to have them think for you and choose your words for you.
umm James from Phoenix I dont know what news you listen to but I believe Obama was AGAINST nuking Pakistan, to which Miss Clinton replied that it was "naive" to make blanket statements about; because bombing Pakistan is a GREAT option. (sarcasm) Obama is the only candidate who makes sense and thats that, I have never cared about another presidential candidate in my life. WAKE UP AMERICA and vote Obama 08! Oh and CNN could we please get more stories on this man not just cut up tidbits, I'm starting to believe those Clinton News Network rumors.
So its September 11th again.
Six years ago today, I drove myself insane, too literally for comfort, due to some extraordinary circumstances.
I knew my accountant was on a United flight to San Francisco that morning. It crashed over a lonely field thanks to a handful of determined Saudi criminals.
My roommate emailed me from the Borders Books at the World Trade Center the night before, saying he'd be back in the building at 7 AM to get an email address he needed from me on the computer he was paying to use there. He and his mom were on vacation.
That next Sept. 11 morning I heard a radio report of fire inside Borders, where trapped people beat helplessly against reinforced glass walls. I was on my way to a friends. I had to pull over.
Another best friend of years had called me at three a.m. on September 11th, 2001, less than four hours before the massive tower directly outside his window would fall and turn his apartment into ash and glass strewn rubble.
He lived in the October Films apartment across the way from the WTC and was up late writing a script. He called to talk shop and said, at the end of the call, that he'd crash for sure until noon the next day and nobody or nothing would wake him up.
My neighbor across the hall banged on my door shortly after the Pentagon was hit. Her eyes gleamed with tears and she was trembling. Her husband worked at the Pentagon, in the section hit. I sat consoling the woman on my couch as we watched it burn. Actually we consoled each other.
This is a true story, and it did indeed drive me nuts, but at this point is not where the story ended, it is only where it began...
I wrote emails until my fingernails bled all day Sept. 11, 2001, typing perhaps a hundred words a minute for hours on end to various people, writing letters to friends to ensure they were safe and to ensure them I was as well, since I often travelled to New York.
Good news came shortly, when my neighbor's wife and I learned her husband called in sick that day and was safe afterall. Tears of pain became those of joy.
After frantically calling for hours I finally reached my roommate, who was also lucky. He and his mom were late catching the subway to the WTC and watched the buildings go down with mouths agape outside their relative's front door, across the water in New Jersey. He has a fearsome picture he snapped of what looks like half of Manhattan going up in a cloud.
As for my writer friend in the October Films Apartment across the street from WTC... his girlfriend reached him by phone after trying repeatedly before the first Tower's collapse. He thought she was joking and stumbled down the stairs in his pajamas. At the front doorway he looked up at the sky falling on him, literally. It was just then that the tower fell. He ran for his life as the concussion hit, throwing some around him down, never to get up.
Three hours later, after a gruelling jog through the city, he reached me via IM at a friends he'd made it to.
As for my accountant on Flight United 93, the plane that crashed before it could hit the White House... I learned that night that she wasn't on it. She'd been in line at the airport to get her ticket when her husband, who works on the East Coast and whom she'd come to visit, had suggested she take a later flight so they could visit and have lunch.
Yes, I was justifiably crazy that first day, as we all were. But it was not my friends' close encounters with death that drove me nuts in the days to follow, it was the knowledge that our entire country lay in the balance, our freedoms, our ideals, everything.
I did not let up my email writing campaign. But my words became an advocacy for calm, writing to every editor I could think of, writing posts to every site I could find. Within a few days I'd made contacts in four different countries. I said over and over, the time had come not to lash out blindly, not to hate universally, not to give in to the fear we all felt, but to breathe, to take a deep breath and not lose the sense of justice and reason and strength our country was famous for.
The people I knew were lucky, others were not. When I watched George Bush pronounce, "I hear you." to the WTC workers at ground zero that first morning, I knew a lot of other people around the world would hear from him too, and not be lucky either.
What George Bush heard was our rage, our bitterness, and our despair. He drank it up like wine and he's been drunk ever since. Mr. Bush had just found the rallying cry he needed to do pretty damn well whatever he wanted just as dictators for centuries have done.
What he did not hear, however, what he was deaf, dumb and blind to, was the call of any great leader, to bring his country together and unite in time of crisis. Instead, over the following months he chose to divide and conquer, just as literally as I first feared. He chose to use the powerful emotional tool he had been handed as a club to his own people, and he still beats away at it even today, by having the Congressional hearings with General Petraus on the state of Iraq on this of all days, by releasing the Bin Laden tapes he's kept under wraps for weeks on this of all days.
Can it really be that he still insists on suggesting that Iraq had something to do with 911, even though we, and he, know its not the case.
He does it because the only tool he has left to him is emotional, right or wrong and he chooses the basest, most pornographic bloody emotions he can drudge from the human soul to suit his needs instead of our own.
I advocated then, and I still do now, to keep common sense and courage, to not give in to the temporary security and loss of freedoms George Bush would subscribe on Sept. 11, 2001 and has been embracing ever since.
The Patriot Act was passed within days, before most of the Senators admittedly had a chance to even read the whole damndable thing. They would not speak out because of fear of persecution while our Constitution was sacrificed via Cliff Notes.
It takes strength not only to strike in a horrible situation like that of 911, but also to show restraint, to show common sense and level headed justice instead of unrestrained rage. It takes strength to speak against popular wishes and justified outrage when it is not politically expedient, as State Senator Barack Obama did when he called Iraq the politically suicidal term, "dumb war."
That night, of September 11, 2001, I walked out of my little apartment in Sherman Oaks and up the main drag on Venture Blvd. There, I found many, many other strangers all doing the same thing. There was such an overwhelming need for community and comfort that night. It was like anything was possible. We'd all come together as a nation and we all looked to our leaders to lead wisely, to show us a way that would stem the flow of blood that we'd just endured.
It was not something George Bush could accomplish in a million years. I prayed for a leader who could see beyond the red haze of hatred, and I hoped I wasn't alone.
But even in the soothing presence of so many that were in need of answers, in need of justice just like myself, I could not shake my unease. I stood next to a storefront on Ventura blvd. all decked out with gory Halloween skulls, along with blasted apart limbs exposing grissle and bone beneath latex.
Dangling and mangled feet hung from one window in particular that I could not stop staring in at.
In the window's reflection I could see many cars with screaming people hanging out, honking, waving American Flags as they passed as if to say "you cannot keep us down." There was a traffic jam and it had become an impromptu parade.
It was then I noticed a local news crew. They were interviewing people about their opinions. The question they asked repeatedly; "Should we go to war?"
The answer, again and again, was "yes." At that point, nobody knew who did it or where they were from. All we knew was that we wanted blood, we wanted body parts in windows for all to see, just like in that macabre display behind me.
But as I tell my three year old, what we want is not always what we need. And we all came to learn that the hard way.
I noticed the guy being interviewed on camera was a man I knew. I'd seen him at parties in the area and he was a producer for CNBC, a recent AFI grad.
Previously I'd thought of him as a sober, analytical type. But that night he was wearing a Red White and Blue bandanna, an American Flag tie, and an American Flag jacket. He was irate on camera, screaming about how we should be bombing someone for what had been done to us.
I did not blame him. In fact, I felt like hugging him. Yet, in his eyes, I saw everything in that Halloween display come to life. I saw the exact circumstances of the death of liberty, reason and respect. Here was a horrible wish from a good man, who was only human, and was hurt, as we all were.
Next, the reporter interviewed me, and I told him that I thought it absurd to be calling for some nation or another to be bombed simply because, without knowing if we faced an acto of war or a criminal act like what happened via Timothy McVeigh. Was it a nation responsible or a group of criminals? Who knew? I told him to look around at the justified outrage. It was great people were coming together, but was it a rush to answers, or madness?
He responded, "Wow, you're the only person we've interviewed tonight that feels we shouldn't immediately be at war."
I responded, "With whom?" and then I went home.
I went home and I cried. I cried because I could not be sure it wouldn't have been me screaming had some of my best friends not made it out of the situation alive as they just had. It is human nature to take revenge after all.
A good leader should be of a higher nature, and to know that's not what we had, worried me all the more.
As I witnessed the events of the last six years since, I've often thought back to the outrage and community on display that night of September 11th. I've often thought of the macabre window where bodyparts were so glamourously displayed.
I've often thought of how we all were marketed that bitter cold meal to follow and how so many ate wholeheartedly of it.
Ever since that night, I've waited. I've waited for someone, anyone of public note to start making sense, to start talking logically again. I've waited for someone to rise above the bickering and fear to take a stand.
In 2004, when I heard Barak Obama speak at the Democratic National Convention, I realized immediately I'd found such a man.
Here was someone that could unite us to fight instead of dividing us to do it. Here is someone who can play to our emotions for good instead of ill, in ways and circumstances George W. Bush never has imagined were possible.
The moment I heard Barack Obama's words I knew they were for me, that he understood the anger, the tragedy, the manipulation of emotion and fear, and that he understood exactly how certain other politicians had used it for their own gain. I understood that he, unlike Bush, knew how to diffuse it. He knew how to bring us back to our senses and out of the realm of senseless violence and fear we'd become so comfortable in.
I believed then at that moment, as I do now, that he would one day soon be President of The United States.
The next time a horrible crime like 911 occurs, we will have a leader that is able to look at the situation not as a tool, or a campaign tactic, or as a call to a fictional global war to benefit a greedy few, but as what it is, a national emergency to be dealt with using level headed strength, integrity and the swiftness that comes only from immense character and good judgement.
If only President Obama had been there so few years ago, what a different world we would have today.
I thought I had lost my sense of hope and imagination for this country in the months since. As time passed I thought we may be doomed to a hell filled with fear, loathing and war without end. I no longer think that. Not a bit. I've regained my fragile sanity at last.
I have regained my innocence through Barack Obama. I have regained my sense that I am not alone in the world with my thoughts, trapped on a body part strewn street corner for all buyers to beware, watching as a great tide overturns all reason and hope.
The tide has turned. We're turning it now, and we'll keep doing so in honor of all those, in the air and on the ground, in New York, Washington, Afganistan and Iraq and across this whole nation and world, that have given their lives and their limbs so that we can get to where we are, which is the most pivotal point in United States History to date. So that we can get to the place that is called change.
The planes missed not just my friends that day, but us all. Fate gave us another opportunity to make a future where planes will never fall from the sky again.
Take it.
God I love this guy. He is a gift to American, I hope we as a nation grab this opportunity. It may not come again.
The facts are what they are and the date of delivery is immaterial. The democratic congress (Obama included) should be able to draw their own conclusions from the testimony (as if they hadn't already).
Can't believe you folks can't see this for what it is...is classic campaign exposure rhetoric.
James from AZ – perhaps you should do some research before perpetuating false information as you've done here. Senator Obama said he would be willing to take action on Mr. Bin Laden in the northern region of Pakistan if his exact location was known, as would most any President. However, he clearly stated that he would NOT use nuclear weapons to this effect. Please take the time to learn about the candidates' true positions before making claims on this forum.
OBAMA 08
I saw in Obama the qualities of a Commander-in-Chief, good judgement and a man capable of facing the issue without making it a partisan issue.
All he said is focus on the problem before laying the tactical strategies.