A Pentagon advisor and military strategist believes Mitt Romney should pound home the fact that the Middle East of today is much different than what it was when President Obama took office four years ago.
Monday, October 22, Lynn University in Boca Raton, Florida, will be the site of the final presidential debate, which will focus exclusively on foreign policy. The continuing controversy over the events that led to the death of the U.S. ambassador and three others in Benghazi, Libya, will undoubtedly dominate the discussion.
Lt. Col. Bob Maginnis (USA-Ret.), now senior fellow for national security at the Family Research Council (FRC), says there were plenty of indicators that things were dangerous in the days leading up to September 11.
"You have security agency personnel who were working in the consulate just prior to 9/11, and they decided that it was too dangerous to work there … so they removed themselves from the consulate to other locations," Maginnis reports.
Given that information, he suggests GOP challenger Mitt Romney should pound home the point that there has been a significant anti-Western shift in the Middle East as a consequence of Obama's support of the alleged "Arab Spring" over the last couple of years.
"It's going to be interesting how Romney and his team use what has happened in the Arab Spring, because if you go back four years, Egypt was an ally, Libya was very cooperative with us, Syria was cooperating, even though we didn't like them, [and] Jordan was a stable country," the FRC senior fellow recalls.
Maginnis concludes that Obama's policies have resulted in countries like Egypt embracing radical Islamists, and that that has hurt the United States.