While America mourns the loss of brave diplomats who served our country admirably in Libya, and while we worry about the safety of our service people in the Egyptian Embassy and other places abroad, Mitt Romney is desperately seeking any sort of opportunity to recover from his gaffes abroad and deflect attention from the fact that he has zero knowledge of world affairs and zero foreign policy credibility. After his only trip abroad that was not to a vacation home, where he insulted London for their Olympics organization, insulted the Palestinians for being lazy, and had an aide desecrate a Polish war memorial while trying to deflect questions about those gaffes, Romney has attacked the Obama administration for sympathizing with the attackers who entered the US Embassy in Benghazi and killed four Americans, including the Ambassador.
While the administration did nothing of the sort, we are used to Romney lying about things to try to look favorable in the eyes of conservatives who value conviction over reality. But the speed at which he used a fast-moving diplomatic crisis to criticize the President, who has arguably pursued the best course of foreign policy in generations, was premature, and revealed his ignorance of the complexity of world events. You can’t blame him, he knows much more about foreign tax codes than foreign cultures.
The tragic attack was the result of a controversial film in California that depicted the Prophet Mohammad as a child molester among other negative characteristics. Romney went to the podium to criticize Obama for apologizing for America. This didn’t happen, all the Egyptian Embassy did was distance the government from the film, to prevent further outrage and to calm a dangerous situation. In other words, diplomats acted diplomatically. Diplomats didn’t let the actions of one radical speak for the entire country. It’s called diplomacy.
Romney’s charge is off base, and dangerous, for a number of reasons. The First Amendment guarantees the right to free speech but laws do exist to limit inflammatory messaging. The filmmakers responsible are unknown, and all they did was start a debacle that ended in the deaths of other innocent Americans. Both sides need to cool off, Romney is guilty of the radicalism that he condemns. We cannot respond to every attack with all of the might of the American army, even if that’s how we initially feel. In basic terms, the USA cannot expect to change Islamic extremists anymore than Islamic extremists can hope to change the USA.
New reports are surfacing that al-Qaeda was behind the attack on the Libyan Embassy, and the film itself seems to be leading to dead ends. It seems like there is a giant mystery behind what the filmmakers did, if they even exist, and where the funding came from. Details will surely start to come out over time, but the point is that Romney tried to find a way to attack Obama and only ended up looking even less capable of leading America in an ever-more globalized world. As we have said over and over again, diplomacy on that level requires tact. The last thing America needs is another war hawk, especially from someone who successfully evaded the draft in Vietnam and has never put on a military uniform.
