Monday, October 08, 2012

Not likely in Baghdad

From what is being billed as Mitt Romney's keynote foreign policy speech today, at Virginia Military Institute --

We saw all of this in Benghazi last month—but we also saw something else, something hopeful. After the attack on our Consulate, tens of thousands of Libyans, most of them young people, held a massive protest in Benghazi against the very extremists who murdered our people. They waved signs that read, “The Ambassador was Libya’s friend” and “Libya is sorry.” They chanted “No to militias.” They marched, unarmed, to the terrorist compound. Then they burned it to the ground. As one Libyan woman said, “We are not going to go from darkness to darkness.”

Barack Obama's conservative critics have a remarkable ability to go straight from the obligatory ridicule of America "leading from behind" in Libya to anecdotes like the above. The flaw is in not going the next step and asking whether there is a link between the fact that the USA didn't invade Libya and held back its weapons after the initial NATO attack with the still high esteem in which the USA is clearly held among ordinary Libyans. It just doesn't fit the narrative.