Dr. Kevin Barrett, author of Questioning the War on Terror: A Primer for Obama Voters, writes:
"The election of Barack Hussein Obama tacked a giant flashing neon question mark onto the Bush Administration's much-ballyhooed but never clearly defined 'War on Terror.' Surveys showed that McCain voters, like Bush voters before them, were heavily motivated by fear of terrorists. Obama voters, on the other hand, were more worried about the economy.
"By voting for a dark-skinned guy with a Muslim father, a middle name Hussein and a last name that sounds like Osama, Americans were saying they didn't buy the Fox News propaganda demonizing Arabs, Muslims, and other vaguely dark-skinned people with funny names.
"By voting for the man they perceived as the anti-war candidate, Americans were re-stating the message they had sent in 2006: End the war NOW already! (What is it about the word NOW that the politicians don't understand?)
"The rejection of the Republicans was also a rejection of torture. Obama campaigned for ending torture and closing Guantanamo, and the voters responded enthusiastically.
"Obama's election showed the voters sensed a close connection between Bush's hugely expensive, ruinous War on Terror and the economic difficulties America is facing. By running up a ten trillion dollar deficit and dragging America's good name through the mud, Bush had wrecked the economy. Perhaps Obama, the peace candidate whose top priority was the economy, would be able to fix it."
Dr. Barrett uses rigorous analysis and just plain common sense to show that Obama voters were right: the War on Terror is a profoundly dubious enterprise. He begins with the observation that Americans are thirty times more likely to die from lightning strikes, and ten times more likely to drown in their bathtubs, than to be killed by terrorists: "Should we declare war against lightning bolts and bathtubs? Should we install PA systems in our bathrooms reminding us that the threat level of bathtub drowning has been raised to orange? Should we create a new Department of Bathtub Security (DBS) empowered to do sneak-and-peak warrantless searches of our bathrooms to make sure that we're using no-slip bath-mats? Should we invade and occupy countries that we falsely blame for bathtub deaths? Would this be any crazier than what we're doing now, allegedly due to the equally insignificant 'terrorist threat'?"
Using the Socratic method, Questioning the War on Terror asks fifty-four hard questions that, taken together, effectively annihilate the central notion around which our post-9/11 political life has revolved. It concludes with a list of twenty-two concrete actions that readers can take to end the War on Terror and achieve the change they voted for.
