Romney Correctly Identifies Obama’s Weaknesses in Foreign Affairs

Republican United States Presidential nominee, Mitt Romney is right that the terrorists were solely responsible for the deadly attack on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi, Libya on September 11, a point I made in my post last month, The Attack on the U.S. Consulate in Libya Was an Act of Jihad, Not Anger http://williamcinfici.blogspot.com/2012/09/the-attack-on-us-consulate-in-libya-was.html.  But Romney is also right that the Obama Administration’s decisions not to provide adequate security and its general appearance of weakness emboldened instead of deterred the enemy and resulted in the murder of the U.S. Ambassador and three other Americans.  

The American diplomatic mission to Libya, which had been attacked on more than one occasion, had repeatedly requested additional security, but the Obama Administration declined the requests.  The Administration insisted for several days that the attack, which was committed with automatic weapons and rocket-propelled grenades, was part of a protest that was a “spontaneous response” to an anti-Islamic video, until it was forced by an accumulation of evidence to acknowledge that the attack by al-Qaeda-inspired militants had been planned well ahead of time and timed on the anniversary of the September 11 Terrorist Attacks and that there had been no protest at all.  Worse, the Administration knew from the first day the true nature of the attack and yet misled the American people about it, focusing on blaming the video and attempting to assure Muslims that it did not condone such perceived insults to Islam, which made it appear weak to all sides.  It appears that the Obama Administration politically wanted to maintain the false impression that because al-Qaeda’s leader was dead, the global terrorist organization was in decline and thus no longer posed a threat to Americans.

In his recent foreign policy address, Romney rightly pointed out other examples of the pattern of President Barack Obama’s weakness in foreign policy.  In Iran, the world’s leading sponsor of terrorism, the Administration has failed to deter the Iranians from developing enough material to make a nuclear bomb and declines to declare at what point Iran’s progress in its nuclear program would be an unacceptable risk. The Iranians do not appear to take Obama’s weak statements that he has not ruled out the military option seriously.  Obama failed to stand with the democratic opposition in Iran when the theocratic dictatorship stole the presidential elections, although it turned against other Muslim dictators who were friendly to the United States.  Meanwhile, Obama has not led adequately in standing against the brutal dictator of Syria, Iran’s only major ally and another sponsor of terrorism.  These failures are part of a pattern of not standing up for Israel, the best ally of the United States.

The Obama Administration, Romney noted, also abandoned Iraq without accomplishing its goal of concluding an agreement to allow some American forces to remain in order to assure Iraqi security, which has left Iraq vulnerable to increasing violence and influence from Iran while reducing American influence dramatically.  Indeed, Iran is able to overfly Iraq in order to send aid to Syria. 

            Another example that Romney identified of Obama’s weakness is Afghanistan, where the Administration announced a timetable for withdrawal for political reasons instead of following the advice of generals to follow the strategy of withdrawing only once the conditions were appropriate.  The announcement allows the enemy, the Taliban, to wait out the Americans until they withdraw and then return to power and establish Afghanistan as a safe harbor for al-Qaeda and other militant Islamist terrorists. 

           

            Moreover, Romney also points out that Obama’s severe defense cuts, which the Administration’s own Secretary of Defense recognizes would be devastating, invite attack instead of deterring it.  Obama hopes for peace, but Romney observes that “hope is not a strategy.”  As an opposite strategy from Obama’s liberal foreign policy, Romney proposes simply to oppose enemies of the United States while supporting its friends.  He observes that American allies look to the United States for leadership in standing up to threats from dictatorships like Iran, Russia, China and Venezuela. 

            I would add a point I have repeatedly made on this blog that although Obama deserves credit for continuing most of President George W. Bush’s successful policies in the War on Terrorism, he has weakened those policies in critical respects.  I had posted earlier the same day of the attack in Benghazi that Obama’s weakness in protecting Americans could result in an attack.  See my post last month, Reflections on the 11^th Anniversary of the September 11 Attack, http://williamcinfici.blogspot.com/2012/09/reflection-on-11th-anniversary-of.html.  Examples include softening interrogation methods and publicizing our methods which allows the enemy to train resistance to them (or either killing terrorists instead of capturing them or advising them of their right to remain silent) and Obama’s failure yet to prosecute the September 11 terrorists in a military court, after his attempt to prosecute them in a civilian trial, and his attempt to close the Guantanamo Bay detention center while releasing some of the detainees there who return to the battlefield to commit more terrorism.