10/7/2008

On October 7, 2008, “One month before the 2008 Presidential election, [Democratic candidate Barack] Obama, then a senator from Illinois, squared off in a debate against [Senator] John McCain [R-AZ] in an arena at Belmont University, in Nashville. A woman in the audience asked Obama if he would be willing to pursue Al Qaeda leaders inside Pakistan, even if that meant invading an ally nation. He replied, ‘If we have Osama bin Laden in our sights and the Pakistani government is unable, or unwilling, to take them out, then I think that we have to act and we will take them out. We will kill bin Laden. We will crush Al Qaeda. That has to be our biggest national-security priority.’ McCain, who often criticized Obama for his naïveté on foreign-policy matters, characterized the promise as foolish, saying, ‘I’m not going to telegraph my punches.’ ”

 – Nicholas Schmidle, “Getting Bin Laden,” The New Yorker, Aug. 8, 2011