An excellent catch by the RNC and Ed Morrissey. At a debate in April 2007, Brian Williams asked Barack Obama what he would do if he were president and 2 American cities were (God forbid) simultaneously hit by Al Qaeda. Here was Barack Obama’s response:

Q: Senator Obama, if, God forbid a thousand times, while we were gathered here tonight we learned that two American cities had been hit simultaneously by terrorists, and we further learned beyond the shadow of a doubt that it had been the work of al-Qaeda, how would you change the US military stance overseas as a result?

A: Well, the first thing we’d have to do is make sure that we’ve got an effective emergency response, something that this administration failed to do when we had a hurricane in New Orleans. And I think that we have to review how we operate in the event of not only a natural disaster, but also a terrorist attack.

The second thing is to make sure that we’ve got good intelligence, a., to find out that we don’t have other threats and attacks potentially out there, and b., to find out, do we have any intelligence on who might have carried it out so that we can take potentially some action to dismantle that network. But what we can’t do is then alienate the world community based on faulty intelligence, based on bluster and bombast. Instead, the next thing we would have to do, in addition to talking to the American people, is making sure that we are talking to the international community.

Because as already been stated, we’re not going to defeat terrorists on our own. We’ve got to strengthen our intelligence relationships with them, and they’ve got to feel a stake in our security by recognizing that we have mutual security interests at stake.

So exactly what would be Senator Obama’s response to a multi-city attack? According to that answer, his response would be as follows: A) Emergency response for the cities; B) Totally and thoroughly verifying our intelligence to the furthest extent possible; C) “Potentially some action to dismantle that network”; D) Talking to Americans and the international community.

Feel safe yet? Never did he pledge to strike back, only floating the possibility of taking “some action to dismantle that network”. Yeah, he doesn’t even say definitively that he’d use military action againt them. His main response is talking to the American people and international community. Do you find that to be a sufficient response to a multi-city attack?