Obama vs Romney: Obama Ignored Intel on Libya Attacks, That is Why His Foreign Policy Sucks
Fox News is reporting that the narrative offered by the Obama administration that the Benghazi attacks were random and spontaneous has exploded. Intelligence officials report that within 24 hours of the attacks on the American embassies in Libya, information linking Al-Qaeda to premeditated attacks was available and credible. The administration took over a week to acknowledge this, and FBI agents apparently still have not arrived to investigate further. The attacks saw the murder of American ambassador Christopher Stevens and three others.
The shocking details belies one more than apparent fact now — Obama and his administration are absolutely clueless on what threats the United States faces abroad. His worldview that America can "nice" its way back into a favorable position within the Arab world is falling to pieces. Furthermore, his obvious short skills in foreign policy matters have cost Americans their lives, and will continue to do so without some form of clear, direct policy. The Campaigner-in-Chief needs to end the practice of stumping for re-election and begin to get a grip on the dynamic changes within the Middle East.
From the outset of this incident, one of two possibilities existed on why Obama's poor response happened. The first, and the more preferable, is he and his intelligence teams simply didn't know what was taking place. While it is bothersome to think our president doesn't know the full details of potential threats against our foreign missions, at the very least it is a problem that can be corrected by doing things better. Under such a scenario, we should be disappointed in his rush to judge the acts as random acts based off of an American production critical of the Prophet Mohammed and Islam. A better response would have been, "we don't know what is going on, but we're finding out." Understandably, in an election year, that won't happen. At the very least, though, the problem is correctable in process.
The second, and infinitely worse, possibility is what appears to have happened. Obama ignored intelligence coming in that identified the violence as coordinated attacks, and that signifies something dastardlier that ignorance. It signifies wanton and willful misdirection on the part of his administration to maintain his narrative and worldview. This evidence, in addition to the history of attacks by religious fundamentalists, signifies that he is grossly mistaken. Violent, sadistic killers will murder people at will when it suits their ends. In the case of religious fundamentalists, their end is nothing more than the destruction of the human spirit under a theocratic world order. Obama's unwillingness to recognize this, but his apparent speed with which to blame the actions of an American filmmaker as the source of the violence, is a nothing less than giving a huge middle finger to the American principles of free speech and a slap on the back to fundamentalists across the globe.
We need a president willing to put American lives ahead of how people might feel about their religious sensibilities being criticized. That's not to say all criticism is warranted or legitimate, but it does say that our government's responsibility is to protect American life and property. Political correctness is neither a guarantee in our founding documents nor a responsibility for our government to enforce. The fact that reports are suggesting the Obama administration has chosen the latter is yet another reason in a long list of why we need to elect Mitt Romney in November.