U.S. Offers “Unequivocal Surrender” to Al-Qaeda

SOUTH WAZIRISTAN DISTRICT, Pakistan, January 21, 2009 (AP): President Barack Obama has traveled to this mountainous region astride the Afghani frontier to offer Osama bin Laden America’s unequivocal surrender in the war on terror. “The voters chose last November to blame America first, raise taxes, and cripple the economy. We begin this journey by suing Al-Qaeda for peace. Together we can,” said a statement released by the White House this evening.

A Bleary-Eyed Reaction
In Washington, the startling about-face in American foreign policy eerily reverberated through a city of empty corridors as power is transferred to the incoming administration. Few high-level Bush administration officials were available for comment, with only former Secretary of State Condeleeza Rice offering her perspective: “We also pursued an overly simplistic foreign policy that lent a deaf ear to history and the realities of geopolitics. And we reaped short term political dividends from an uninformed electorate, but at the cost of strengthening our adversaries and exposing the limits of American hard power. So good luck to them,” she said.

Conservative commentators, who have struggled with how to criticize a Presidential candidate that displayed a Teflon-like ability to shrug off their attacks during the election, appeared no closer to solving the riddle. “I’ve always found it so much easier to ridicule Democrats as traitorous and weak without a basis in fact,” Ann Coulter said on NBC’s Today Show. “This definitely makes it tougher to sell books. But I’m just glad that NBC still takes me seriously enough to ask me onto national television,” she said.

International reaction was more pointed. “We applaud America’s action,” said Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov. “More importantly, we are pleased that the Obama-bin Laden summit continues America’s policy of putting a disorganized, fringe confederation of extremists on equal footing with itself. This makes it easier for us to crack down on dissent under the false banner of anti-terrorism. Of course, we’d prefer the American president demagogue and fearmonger, but we’ll take it,” he added. Chinese President Hu Jintao, speaking during a state visit to Sudan, had characteristically little to say: “We’d prefer to remain inscrutable, the better to fit the West’s stereotype of us, thanks,” he said in a press conference.


Under the Cover of Night
Air Force One landed at a Pakistani military base near Karachi at 1:30am local time, and the President was ferried by helicopter to this lawless part of Pakistan widely suspected to be bin Laden’s redoubt. The White House press release provided little detail on the meeting’s agenda, saying only that the President is ready to “engage bin Laden without precondition.”

Word of the trip had leaked to several prominent news organizations yesterday, but the administration asked stories be held until Air Force One was on the ground in Pakistan. Officials later admitted that they weren’t too concerned about gaining cooperation on the matter: “The media failed to scrutinize the previous administration’s blind rush into Iraq and breathtaking incompetence until both were obvious to a fifth grader,” said Press Secretary Alan Colmes. “Frankly, we’re counting on the same honeymoon. So thanks for take orders in exchange for access.”

A Night Spent on a Stool
Upon arriving at the district capital of Wana, the President changed into the traditional garb of a Waziri elder and spent the rest of the night in a stark room outfitted with only a table, stool and telephone, making and receiving calls from world leaders. “Their counsel strengthens the case America makes to the world,” Obama said in an interview with Al-Jazeera. “Our talks in the coming days must be grounded in Saudi human rights norms, be consistent with French labor laws, and respect Japanese notions of individualism. ‘Together’ doesn’t just mean Americans,” he said.

However, there is no indication that bin Laden is willing to meet with the President. A website with known links to extremists, OsamaTalkingPoints.com, posted a release from Al-Qaeda: “America’s offer is a problem for us. We’re good at killing civilians, playing to the economic disenchantment of the Arab world, and creating false divisions between Western powers. Our demands were never supposed to be a serious platform for governance, and we sort of hoped nobody would notice."

"Can we get back to you on this?”

Hating America, Nihal-Style

Try booking a window seat during your next daytime cross-country flight. Although astute frequent fliers angle for aisle seats, sitting next to the window never gets old to me. From New York, the terrain eases from greenery into farmland. A quick burst of mountains, some desert terrain, and you’re landing in the Californian airport of your choice.

What’s more striking than the evolution of the landscape or the sheer amount of space is how thoroughly, how completely, Americans have colonized the land below. If it’s arable, we’re growing, living or working on it. Even the forbidding desert houses such improbable cities as Phoenix and Las Vegas. You won’t find a better five hour display of the unparalleled bounty of resources we’ve been enjoying for the past 400 years. But this bounty has bred a flaw in the American psyche: blessed with plenty, we’ve never learned to make do within limits.

Make no mistake, this is fundamentally a good thing. America’s pursuit of better, faster, and stronger has given the world airplanes, the Internet, and Post-It Notes. All things considered, I’d rather be surrounded by people that usually ask “why not?” as a rhetorical question. But our instinct to push the envelope often makes prudence an afterthought. Examples abound: a war, funded to the last dime with borrowed money. Uncontrolled growth from Atlanta to the arid West, without a thought to husbanding the necessary water for newcomers. The average American saved just 0.5% of their income last year, which compares shamefully to the 8.9% recorded in 1978.

Well, it looks like our resources aren’t as unlimited as we thought. Texas barely has the funds to pay for the upkeep of its road network, let alone pay for new ones needed for a population that has grown 60% over the past 25 years. Healthcare premiums are the silent tax largely to blame for wage stagnation over the last two decades, but we still stubbornly insist that the profit motive of insurance and pharmaceutical companies is the most efficient way to deliver healthcare. Why don’t we have the money to keep our bridges from falling down or inspect Chinese toy imports, but our Defense Secretary can ask Congress for $170,000,000,000 to fund the war in 2009 with a straight face?

Don’t look to our elected officials for leadership on this front. When the costs of government rise faster than the tax base, lawmakers’ first instinct is to raise taxes, rather than question the effectiveness or efficiency of the bureaucracy. I saw this mentality on brilliant display at one of New Jersey Governor Jon Corzine’s town halls, where he’s proposing to cut the state’s $32 billion debt in half by raising road tolls 800% over the next 14 years. Not one slide of the Governor’s PowerPoint presentation identified tangible cuts in government spending—that is, to do with less.

But a successful democracy’s lawmakers are a reflection of its citizenry. Exhibit A: our man-child of a President who wins two elections, and then advises Americans how they can do their part to fight the ‘war on terror’: “I encourage you all to go shopping more,” he smirks to a compliant press corps. So it’s not surprising how Mitt Romney speaks to an America that insists on driving SUVs and borrowing sub-prime dollars to build McMansions, but then frets about a trillion-dollar war in the Middle East and plummeting housing prices.

To simply chuckle at Romney’s ability to squeeze “God,” “Family,” and “Reagan” into a thirty second response is to misunderestimate the political system in which he operates, and the free-candy mentality of America that allows it to thrive. Human history is littered with examples of dominant nations that spent like drunken sailors, and what happens next. Turns out that the sun did eventually set on the British Empire. And the French, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, German, Soviet, Roman, Ottoman, Mogul, Mongol and Japanese, for that matter. Patting our collective backs feels good, but it does nothing to ensure that the American standard of living remains the envy of the world for the next 100 years.

Everyone has an opinion about gay marriage, abortion, and Al Sharpton. But I suggest that we change the subject, and begin a serious discussion about how to update the 1950s-era radar that guided my cross-country flight. Or making sure that the food we eat is safe. We have so much. We should be doing more with it.