The Romney campaign has escalated their attacks on President Obama following the murder of four Americans, including the ambassador, in Libya. In an interview with the Washington Post, Mitt Romney’s top foreign policy adviser pinned the blame for the attacks squarely on Obama and flatly claimed they would not have happened if Romney had been president:

Advisers to Mitt Romney on Thursday defended his sharp criticism of President Obama and said that the deadly protests sweeping the Middle East would not have happened if the Republican nominee were president.

“There’s a pretty compelling story that if you had a President Romney, you’d be in a different situation,” Richard Williamson, a top Romney foreign policy adviser, said in an interview. “For the first time since Jimmy Carter, we’ve had an American ambassador assassinated.”

Previously, Romney, his campaign and the Republican Party accused Obama of “sympathizing” with the terrorists who killed Americans in the hours after the attack. The accusation quickly recieved widespread, bipartisan condemnation. Romney then repeated the charge.

Though presidential candidate Mitt Romney criticized President Obama (falsely) for being insufficiently supportive of free speech rights during attacks on American diplomats in Egypt and Libya, Romney himself has ran into trouble on related issues before. In 2005, while governor of Massachusetts, Romney called for the warrantless wiretapping of Massachusetts mosques in order to identify terrorism suspects. Speaking to the Heritage Foundation, a right wing think-tank in Washington, D.C., Romney proposed a wide-ranging surveillance program that encompassed both mosques and foreign students from “terrorist-sponsored states”:

How many [students] are coming to our state and going to those institutions who have come from terrorist-sponsored states? Do we know where they are? Are we tracking them? …How about people who are in settings — mosques, for instance — that may be teaching doctrines of hate and terror. Are we monitoring that? Are we wiretapping? Are we following what’s going on?

Because Romney was selling his idea as a means of identifying places from which extremist doctrines are disseminated rather than keeping track of individuals already under suspicion, it would seem to imply that police should be bugging mosques that aren’t already known to house radicals. Without prior suspicion of a crime leaves open the possibility that the type of monitoring Romney proposed would have been warrantless. Romney attempted to downplay this possibility in a subsequent interview, telling Fox News’s John Gibson that he supported devoting more resources to practices already in use rather than developing new surveillance techniques and that FBI wiretapping of mosques currently required probable cause.

Regardless, Romney walked back his proposal after it caused an uproar among Massachusetts Muslims and civil libertarians at the time, who believed the proposal was discriminatory and violated Muslim-Americans’ right to freely practice their religion.

Authorities that followed Romney’s prescribed course failed dismally. Earlier this year, the Associated Press ran a Pulitzer-Prize winning series about a massive, secret spying operation conducted by the New York Police Department (with CIA assistance) against local Muslims. Among other tactics, the NYPD spied on local mosques without warrants or probable cause. The NYPD generated no actionable leads, harmed real counterterrorism intelligence-gathering efforts, and prompted a Justice Department review over potential civil rights violations by the NYPD.

By Jack Jenkins

If you turned on the news anytime this past week, you were probably greeted with at least one of the following images: angry people shouting and burning American flags, an American pastor making snide remarks about Islam, or the charred, graffiti-covered remains of the U.S. Consulate in Libya.

The images, of course, documented the recent killing of Christopher Stevens, U.S. Ambassador to Libya, and other American diplomats by militants, and the uproar in the Middle East over an allegedly American-made film mocking the Prophet Muhammad. In response, right-wing pundits were quick to weigh in with an old narrative: the social and religious differences of the West and the Middle East are insurmountable, and will inevitably lead to violence.

But you might not have seen this: hundreds of Libyan men, women and children assembled in the streets of Benghazi, holding up signs with slogans that read: “Thugs and Killers don’t represent Benghazi or Islam,” “Chris Stevens was a friend to all Libyans,” and “Sorry People of America this not behavior of Islam or profit [sic].”

You also probably didn’t hear about the Coptic Christians who joined Muslims in expressing peaceful disapproval of the film, or an Israeli Rabbi who condemned both the film and the attacks on the American diplomats.

You didn’t see or read about these people because they weren’t considered “newsworthy” – explosions tend to capture national attention more than peaceful protests. But just because these events didn’t attract journalists doesn’t make their message any less important: in the midst of violence and anger, these faithful people represent the majority of Muslims, Christians, and Jews whose beliefs and voices are being held hostage by the hateful bellowing of an angry few.

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Republicans love Ronald Reagan. Despite the fact that today’s GOP is so far to the right that it probably would consider Reagan a radical leftist, whatever policy Republicans want to prescribe to a any particular issue, they just stamp a “Ronald Reagan” seal of approval to it and the crowd goes wild.

Mitt Romney is too, no stranger to idealizing Reagan. So one might expect that his widely ridiculed outburst that President Obama sympathized with the attackers who killed four American foreign service officers this week was something Ronald Reagan would have done. Not exactly. Some reporters have wondered whether Reagan attacked President Carter after his failed attempt at rescuing American hostages in Iran during the 1980 campaign. So what did Reagan say as news broke? He called for national unity:

“This is a difficult day for all of us Americans. … It is time for us…to stand united. It is a day for quiet reflection…when words should be few and confined essentially to our prayers.”

George H.W. Bush, also campaigning for the GOP nomination at that time was more direct: “I unequivocally support the president of the United States — no ifs, ands or buts — and it certainly is not a time to try to go one-up politically. He made a difficult, courageous decision.”

And while Reagan did criticize Carter’s foreign policy throughout the campaign, he refrained from attacking the Iran issue during his debate with the president once he sealed the nomination. It’s a lesson Romney can learn from. As he has admitted, “I’ve learned over time, like Ronald Reagan and George Herbert Walker Bush and others, my experience in life over, what, 19 — 17, 18, 19 years has told me that sometimes I was wrong.” “Where I was wrong, I’ve tried to correct myself.” Now may be time for that correction.

Greg Noth contributed to this post.

As GOP foreign policy hands balk at Mitt Romney’s statements about the attacks on American diplomats in Libya and Egypt, the governor’s campaign and its surrogates continue to push the line that Obama’s “weak” foreign policy and his purported “apologies” for America invited the violence:

– LIZ CHENEY: “Apologizing for America, appeasing our enemies, abandoning our allies and slashing our military are the hallmarks of Mr. Obama’s foreign policy.” [Romney Press Release, 9/12/2012]

– SEN. JOHN MCCAIN (R-AZ): “The United States is weak and withdrawing and that’s why you’re seeing a lot of leaders reacting.” [Today Show, 9/13/2012]

— SEN. JIM INHOFE (R-OK): “What foreign policy? The policy of appeasement. Yes, it’s happening as a result of that.” [The Hill, 9/13/2012]

But there is little correlation between perceived “weakness” and attacks on US embassies/consulates or terrorism more broadly. Six times as many attacks on American embassies and consulates took place during the Bush administration than during the Obama administration to date and experts on terrorism suggest that the causes of terrorism are complex and multifaceted, ranging from political grievances to ideology and strategic rationality to the social circumstances of potential terrorists.

Obama also “has not made” apologizing for America a centerpoint of his foreign policy, nor has he shirked from using military force and coercion in foreign policy. The president helped lead a coalition to topple Muammer Qaddafi, greatly expanded the controversial use of drones and special forces against al-Qaeda in several countries around the world, escalated the ground war in Afghanistan, and brought down significant international pressure on the Iranian nuclear program.

Neither the President nor the Secretary of State approved the supposedly apologetic statement from the Cairo Embassy condemning the anti-Islam movie that may have infuriated the mobs in both Egypt and Libya. The reaction was issued before the attacks began and closely echoed Romney’s own sentiment. As his campaign said in talking points on Wednesday, “Governor Romney rejects the reported message of the movie. There is no room for religious hatred or intolerance.”

A bipartisan group of former U.S. diplomats, generals and government officials released a report today urging caution against the United States launching military strikes on Iran to prevent it from acquiring nuclear weapons.

The report — whose signatories include Brent Scowcroft, ret. Adm. William Fallon, former Republican senator Chuck Hagel, ret. Gen. Anthony Zinni and former Amb. Thomas Pickering — concludes that a unilateral Israeli attack would set back the Iranian nuclear program by only 2 years and an American attack by 4 years. But if the objective is “ensuring that Iran never acquires a nuclear bomb,” the U.S. “would need to conduct a significantly expanded air and sea war over a prolonged period of time, likely several years.” In order to achieve regime change, the report says, “the occupation of Iran would require a commitment of resources and personnel greater than what the U.S. has expended over the past 10 years in the Iraq and Afghanistan wars combined.”

While the report notes that an attack would yield some benefits — such as damaging Iran’s nuclear and military facilities and demonstrating U.S. seriousness in preventing Iran from obtaining nuclear weapons — costs could include Iranian counter-attacks against Israel and American interests, a breakdown of the international coalition against Iran and the “increased likelihood of Iran becoming” a nuclear armed state. A sustained conflict “would boost the price of oil and further disrupt an already fragile world economy,” “could further alienate Muslims and others worldwide,” and likely “unify the [Iranian] population behind the government than to generate resistance.” The signatories also conclude (emphasis added):

Serious costs to U.S. interests would also be felt over the longer term, we believe, with problematic consequences for global and regional stability, including economic stability. A dynamic of escalation, action, and counteraction could produce serious unintended consequences that would significantly increase all of these costs and lead, potentially, to all-out regional war.

The report’s conclusions echo assessments made by various former and current American and Israeli government and military officials.

U.S. and Israeli intelligence, and the International Atomic Energy Agency, have determined that the Iranian leadership has yet to decide on whether to build nuclear weapons. The report’s summary notes that “signs of an Iranian decision to build a nuclear weapon would likely be detected, and the U.S. would have at least a month to implement a course of action.”

“Planners and pundits ought to consider that the riots and unrest following a Web entry about an obscure film are probably a fraction of what could happen following a strike — by the Israelis or U.S. — on Iran,” retired Lt. Gen. Gregory Newbold, an endorser of the Iran report and a former operations chief for the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told the Associated Press in an interview.

“You can’t kill intellectual power,” said retired Army Lt. Gen. Frank Kearney, who endorsed the report, referring to the point that military strikes will not permanently end Iran’s nuclear program. The AP notes that he is a former deputy director at the National Counterterrorism Center and former deputy commander of U.S. Special Operations Command.

The Obama administration is aware, not only of the threat an Iranian nuclear weapon poses, but also the potential negative consequences of a military attack on Iran, such as those outlined in this new report. And that, coupled with U.N., U.S. and Israeli assessments that Iran has not yet decided on whether to build a nuclear weapon, leads the administration to pursue a diplomatic solution with Iran, a track the it deems the “best and most permanent way” to solve the nuclear crisis.