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?”