Mick’s Musings

BROKAW:Next question for Sen. Obama, it comes from the F section and is from Katie Hamm. Katie?

KATIE HAMM: Should the United States respect Pakistani sovereignty and not pursue al Qaeda terrorists who maintain bases there, or should we ignore their borders and pursue our enemies like we did in Cambodia during the Vietnam War?

OBAMA: Katie, it’s a terrific question and we have a difficult situation in Pakistan. I believe that part of the reason we have a difficult situation is because we made a bad judgment going into Iraq in the first place when we hadn’t finished the job of hunting down bin Laden and crushing al Qaeda.

So what happened was we got distracted, we diverted resources, and ultimately bin Laden escaped, set up base camps in the mountains of Pakistan in the northwest provinces there.

Reality Check:

Osama Bin Laden escaped into Pakistan during the Tora Bora campaign in December 2001.  The Iraq build up didn’t start until late 2002 and many deployments didn’t actually start until January 2003.  There was no diversion of resources to Iraq at this time.

Not that I expect Barack Obama to be a student of military history, I think he’s told this lie so many times he actually believes it now.