Promoting his latest film earlier this year, Michael Moore ignored the achievements of the Progressive movement and the New Deal when he declared, "capitalism is evil and you can't regulate evil." Now on the eve of President Obama's address to the nation on his Afghanistan strategy, Moore is rewriting the history of the campaign that put Obama in the Oval Office.

In an open letter to President Obama, Moore on Monday seems to have forgotten candidate Obama's aggressive stance towards Al Qaeda in Afghanistan and Pakistan:

Do you really want to be the new "war president"? If you go to West Point tomorrow night (Tuesday, 8pm) and announce that you are increasing, rather than withdrawing, the troops in Afghanistan, you are the new war president. Pure and simple. And with that you will do the worst possible thing you could do -- destroy the hopes and dreams so many millions have placed in you. With just one speech tomorrow night you will turn a multitude of young people who were the backbone of your campaign into disillusioned cynics. You will teach them what they've always heard is true -- that all politicians are alike. I simply can't believe you're about to do what they say you are going to do. Please say it isn't so.

But at almost every turn in the 2008 campaign (for example, starting at about the 17:30 mark in the video above), it was Barack Obama who pledged to "finish the fight in Afghanistan."

In August 2007, as you'll recall, Senator Obama received a hellstorm of criticism for his statements regarding attacking Al Qaeda bases in Pakistan. As part of a broad - and forceful - foreign policy speech on August 1, Obama rightly took the Bush administration to task for the failure of its "no safe havens" doctrine in Pakistan. Regarding the Al Qaeda sanctuary safely nestled along the Afghan border, Obama declared:

"If we have actionable intelligence about high-value terrorist targets and President Musharraf won't act, we will."

And while Republican presidential candidate John McCain in February 2008 blasted Obama's advocacy of unilateral American attacks against Al Qaeda targets in Pakistan, by the beginning of last year the Bush administration itself was already carrying them out.

From almost the inception of his campaign, Obama argued that the diversion of U.S. military assets from Afghanistan to Iraq meant that "the people who were responsible for murdering 3,000 Americans on 9/11 have not been brought to justice." In a June speech, Obama highlighted McCain's denial of this inescapable point:

"We had al Qaeda and the Taliban on the run back in 2002. But then we diverted military, intelligence, financial, and diplomatic resources to Iraq. And yet Senator McCain has said as recently as this April that, 'Afghanistan is not in trouble because of our diversion to Iraq.' I think that just shows a dangerous misjudgment of the facts, and a stubborn determination to ignore the need to finish the fight in Afghanistan."

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