Herald news services
As an Edmonds couple Saturday grieved the loss of their son, President Bush ordered U.S. troops to get ready for war.
The Edmonds couple’s son, Army Sgt. Maj. Larry L. Strickland, 52, died in the Pentagon attack Tuesday.
“My husband, he has his 85th birthday in a few days, and we were supposed to be going. Not him,” Olga Strickland tearfully told KING-TV.
“The family is now in the toughest stage of grief,” said U.S. Rep. Jay Inslee, D-Wash., who spoke with Strickland’s parents.
“I let them know the whole country is with this family today, and will be,” he said.
Meanwhile, the outlines of a new U.S. strategy to combat terrorism, born in the flames of the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, are beginning to emerge – and capturing Osama bin Laden is only a very small part of it.
“Those who make war against the United States have chosen their own destruction,” Bush declared Saturday.
“We will smoke them out of their holes,” the president said. “We’ll get them running and we’ll bring them to justice.”
Bush administration officials say they are resolved not only to put Saudi-born terrorist bin Laden out of business, but to destroy the sprawling network of Islamic terrorist organizations he helped create, perhaps strike other terrorist groups as well, and force countries that support terrorism to halt once and for all.
It’s a tall order, and will take a long time – much longer than a single airstrike or ground commando raid into Afghanistan.
“If it takes multiyear, we’ll devote multiyear,” a senior official said last week. “And I think it’s probably a good thing to think that it probably will.”
Many of the details still are being worked out. Bush and his top aides spent Saturday at Camp David, the presidential retreat in Maryland, in what one official called “continuous discussions” of the next steps to take.
But in its broad outlines, the counterterrorism crusade proclaimed in response to Tuesday’s attacks on New York and Washington, D.C., is sweeping in its goals and, at least in principle, unconstrained in its willingness to use force.
“Whatever it takes,” Bush told reporters at Camp David on Saturday.
Including ground troops? “The president has not ruled anything out,” spokesman Ari Fleischer said.
The emerging strategy has four major components:
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