Obama courage: Let's hunker down and survive

During the debate on Friday in Mississippi, Senator Obama responded to the following question from Jim Lehrer:

What do you think the likelihood is that there would be another 9/11-type attack on the continental United States?

As you can see from the complete answer quoted below the fold, Senator Obama did not respond to the question directly, but he did provide some insight into his dangerous philosophy about homeland security and fighting terrorism. In a nutshell, Senator Obama believes we need more effort to harden facilities in the U.S. so that they will survive an attack. We may suppose also that his philosophy extends to arresting surviving terrorists after the attack, trying them in U.S. courts with full constitutional rights. That terrorism is to be fought with fireman and nurses instead of soldiers.

A basic tenet of U.S. national policy is to protect the American civilian population by conducting any battles on the enemy's territory. This suggests a policy that instead of hardening facilities here at home, the nation should attack the terrorists wherever they are located abroad. It is this significant difference in philosophy exhibited by Senator Obama which if implemented could have dire consequences for the citizens of the United States. Senator Obama, and his philosophy is dangerous for the nation.

OBAMA: Well, first of all, I think that we are safer in some ways. Obviously, we've poured billions of dollars into airport security. We have done some work in terms of securing potential targets, but we still have a long way to go.

We've got to make sure that we're hardening our chemical sites. We haven't done enough in terms of transit; we haven't done enough in terms of ports.

And the biggest threat that we face right now is not a nuclear missile coming over the skies. It's in a suitcase.

This is why the issue of nuclear proliferation is so important. It is the -- the biggest threat to the United States is a terrorist getting their hands on nuclear weapons.

And we -- we are spending billions of dollars on missile defense. And I actually believe that we need missile defense, because of Iran and North Korea and the potential for them to obtain or to launch nuclear weapons, but I also believe that, when we are only spending a few hundred million dollars on nuclear proliferation, then we're making a mistake.

The other thing that we have to focus on, though, is al Qaeda. They are now operating in 60 countries. We can't simply be focused on Iraq. We have to go to the root cause, and that is in Afghanistan and Pakistan. That's going to be critical. We are going to need more cooperation with our allies.

And one last point I want to make. It is important for us to understand that the way we are perceived in the world is going to make a difference, in terms of our capacity to get cooperation and root out terrorism.

And one of the things that I intend to do as president is to restore America's standing in the world. We are less respected now than we were eight years ago or even four years ago.