The hate-Obama letters from messers Sweeney and Hartshorn in the Sept. 23 News and Sentinel ignored the president's successful foreign policy record. In 2008, candidate Obama promised to end the war in Iraq. He did. Last week, the last 2009 "surge" troops left Afghanistan (the 68,000 troops that remain will leave by 2014).
Candidate Obama promised to "bring justice to terrorists": 23 Islamist terrorists, including Osama bin Laden, have been killed since 2009 (Sweeney might want to ask them if they're "better off" than they were four years ago). With the help of Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, Obama implemented the 2011 Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty. Significant progress has been made in restoring an American foreign policy discredited by the "perpetual-war" policies of Bush/Cheney and Neocons like Dan Senor (who now "advises" the Romney/Ryan campaign).
And what are Romney's "policies?" Romney's foreign-policy "experience" involves shipping American jobs overseas for Bain Capital and insulting the British at the 2012 London Olympics. During the recent tragic events in the Middle East, Romney "seized the moment" and (without knowledge of the facts) verbally attacked U.S. Embassy officials in Cairo, Egypt, at the very moment they were being physically attacked by street mobs over an American-made, anti-Muslim video. When Ambassador Stevens and three others were murdered in a separate, more serious, attack by Islamist terrorists upon the U.S. Consulate in Benghazi, Libya, Romney doubled-down and suggested, by denouncing the heinous video, the Cairo Embassy people were "apologizing" for "American values." Is slandering a major world religion an "American value?"
The president decisively reacted in Libya by sending 200 Marines and two warships to the region. He consulted with the newly organized Libyan government in Tripoli that later drove the Islamist fanatics out of Benghazi and arrested their leaders. Then the president (who proved last year that he can "multi-task" by trouncing Trump at dinner while simultaneously ordering Bin Laden's death) continued his campaign for re-election in Vegas. Romney would probably have attacked Tripoli (where residents mourned the death of Stevens) or Chicago.
"A 'statesman' thinks of the next generation, but a 'politician' thinks only of the next election." Mitt Romney is no "statesman!"
Fred O'Neill
Marietta
