McCain fights the wrong war - Saturday, Sep. 16, 2006

Union Leader

U.S. Sen. John McCain is due in New Hampshire this weekend and we somehow don't think it is just to watch the NASCAR race in Loudon, as great an event as that surely is.

Sen. McCain comes here because he wants to be our next President. But the question is being asked, in the midst of the most difficult and challenging war we have ever faced, can the nation afford a President McCain?

No doubt his motives are pure, but McCain's current actions are blocking our ability to gain from terrorist captives the vital information we need to fight a war in which the enemy strikes us here at home from multiple locations around the world.

This is a new kind of war waged by a ruthless, extremist enemy that cares nothing for Geneva Convention niceties. The enemy is out to impose its religious views on the western world in general and the United States in particular and it attacks innocent women and children as well as our men and women in uniform. And if the latter are taken prisoner, they are burned, butchered or beheaded.

Sen. McCain is fighting the wrong war when he equates stateless Islamic jihadists with nations with whom we have fought in the past. You don't read Miranda rights to barbarians or worry about "what the world thinks'' when you are fighting an enemy that is out to destroy you. If McCain can't understand that, New Hampshire citizens must question why they should support him for President.