On Tonight's Foregin Policy Debate

     I expect the President will do well. Foreign policy is not an area that Romney feels very comfortable in and usually ends up saying something really stupid. The President has a very positive record on foreign policy and needs to make it strongly and without apologies and  I expect he will.

     The President never went on any "apology tour" to being hi Presidency and he certainly need not go on one tonight. Yet even some liberals seem to have decided that the President has given too many "shifting" narratives about what happened in Libya since the attacks. So even Greg Sargent gets it wrong here:

      "There are certainly legitimate outstanding questions to be answered about the administration’s shifting explanations for the attacks, and more broadly about what the attacks say about Obama’s policies in the region. And polls suggest Romney has gained a good deal of ground in foreign policy as the race has tightened."

      http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/plum-line

      See this sets the President up in too defensive a posture. If there were something to apologize for I'd say the best move is to honestly admit it and apologize. However, there is nothing to apologize about. You would expect the explanation for what happen to change and "shift" as it's a fluid situation where our intelligence agencies are learning more as things develop. It's unrealistic to expect a wholly finished narrative in the early days.

      What's more the simple narrative that Romney and company had been spreading has been shown to be mostly all wrong. You start from the oft-repeated claim that the President never used the word "terrorist" to describe the attack, to the insistence that the attack was planned by al Qaeda long in advance and that the anti-Islam video had no relevance to the attacks. However, with the new talking points released by the CIA on Friday we see that what State Department Susan Rice said back in September was totally in line with what the CIA had written on the very day.

        In truth this should not be used as a political weapon as we still don't know exactly what happened though everything that our intelligence tells us suggests it happened nothing like Romney and company are claiming. It seems that it was inspired by protests in Cairo-that were a response to the video. What happened was that terrorist groups in Libya used the outrage over the video opportunistically as a pretext for committing their terrorist acts.

        Beyond this the President should point out that Libya is a success story for Administration policy. At the request of some of our allies, the U.N. and leading Arab groups we joined the Nato operation. This was not "leading from behind."

        If it doesn't please Romney it may be because we got consensus rather than simply forcing ourselves onto the situation like Bush did in Iraq. Romney seems to share the Bush Administration's disdain for diplomacy. It seems that for Romney too, the only worthwhile diplomacy is gunboat diplomacy.

        While we joined a coalition rather than doing an Iraq, it's clear that our participation in this operation was a major key to its success: had we not done so on that Friday, by Sunday night Benghazi would have fallen to