During tonight’s foreign policy presidential Mitt Romney repeated his attack on President Obama for the U.S. Navy and Air Force being smaller than they were in 1917 and 1947 respectively. This is a “pointless” comparison, as CNN noted recently, explaining that it’s “wrong to assume that fewer ships translates to a weaker military” or fighters for that matter “[b]ecause of the technological supremacy of current Navy ships, the military can get more from each one than it did even 10 to 15 years ago.”

Obama pointed this out during the debate:

OBAMA: But I think Governor Romney maybe hasn’t spent enough time looking at how our military works. You mentioned the Navy, for example, and that we have fewer ships than we did in 1916. Well, Governor, we also have fewer horses and bayonets, because the nature of our military’s changed. We have these things called aircraft carriers, where planes land on them. We have these ships that go underwater, nuclear submarines.

And so the question is not a game of Battleship, where we’re counting slips. It’s what are our capabilities

Watch the clip:

In other words, 1,000 1940s-era fighter planes combined can’t do what one of today’s B-2 Stealth bomber can do, the same for Navy ships in 1917 versus today.

The Washington Post fact checker agreed with CNN. “This is a nonsense fact.” Factcheck.org noted it’s “a meaningless claim.”

Romney foreign policy adviser Dan Senor struggled to differentiate the GOP presidential candidate’s foreign policy towards Iran from President Obama’s during an appearance on CNBC’s The Kudlow Report, just an hour and a half before the final presidential debate focusing on foreign policy.

Asked directly by host Larry Kudlow about whether Romney would engage in direct one-on-one negotiations with Iran, Senor responded that the former Massachusetts governor would keep all options on the table — just as Obama has promised to do — and did not say if he’d agree to direct talks:

KUDLOW: Let me ask you, Dan Senor, for the record. If Governor Romney were president, would he take a one-on-one meeting with Iran?

SENOR: Look, here is Governor Romney’s approach to Iran: Obviously he wants a diplomatic solution to the Iranian situation. As we said, they are getting closer to closer to nuclear bombs, and we have to deploy a whole range of tools and tactics, economic pressure, diplomatic isolation. Got to make sure that the military threat, that option is credible in the eyes of the Iranians, not that we would use it but that they think it’s credible and diplomatically in terms of engagement. There are a whole range of tools and the governor has said he wouldn’t rule any of those tools out. He doesn’t want to reward bad behavior by the Iranians. Wants to know what the Iranians are sincere to make any decision.

KUDLOW: I’m not sure what the difference is. I’m not sure what the difference is. You’re two both distinguished gentlemen. I’m not sure where the difference is, at least on Iran. [...]

SENOR: The problem is mixed messages. He’s sent mixed messages and lost credibility in negotiating with Iran. Governor Romney will not send mixed messages. He’ll be much tougher.

Watch it:

Since the New York Times reported that Obama has agreed in principle to participate in one-on-one negotiations with Iran, Romney’s team has repeatedly refused to say if he would engage in such talks if he’s elected president in November. The administration has also denied the Times’ claims, but has maintained its policy of being open to direct negotiations.

But judging from Senor’s answer, Romney may also struggle to differentiate his approach towards Iran from Obama’s. Indeed, the Obama administration has repeatedly declared that the military option is on the table, and has built up America’s military presence in the Persian Gulf to act as a check against Iran.

Obama has also applied “intense external pressure” on Iran, signing into law tough sanctions that Romney himself supports. The policy has curbed the country’s oil exports “by more than 1 million barrels a day” and as the New York Times reported, the sanctions “have severely depressed the value of its national currency, the rial, causing higher inflation and forcing Iranians to carry ever-fatter wads of bank notes to buy everyday items.”

It’s no secret that the American right believes that President Obama refused to call the Benghazi attack “terrorism” for political purposes even after Candy Crowley debunked the meme on national TV during the presidential debate. But CNBC host Maria Bartiromo took the meme to a whole new level today, accusing the President of attempting to drum up support for cuts to military spending at home — an assertion which her guest, Senator John McCain (R-AZ), pivoted off of rather than challenged:

BARTIROMO: Senator, I don’t understand. This whole Benghazi story boggles the mind. I mean, It was September 11th. The embassies were burned, our ambassador was murdered. The Wall Street Journal reported that the CIA told the President for ten days in his daily briefings that we could see an attack on the U.S. consulate and there was [sic] the result of protests. Why would the President not call it out for what it was on day one? Why wait so long to tell the American people that it was a terrorist attack? Is it to justify defense cuts? To make everybody believe since bin Laden is dead, everything’s quiet on the home front? I don’t even understand why the President of the United States would not call it what it was from day one.

MCCAIN: I think primarily it was this narrative that the President has been saying for so long that he got bin Laden, which we all appreciate, but then that al-Qaeda is on the run.

Watch it:

Bartiromo’s framing answers her own question (and refutes McCain’s response): aside from three clear references to “acts of terror” directly after the attack, the reason Obama wasn’t out front blaming al-Qaeda or another group was because, as Bartiromo notes, the CIA was telling him it was the video and that there’s scant evidence al-Qaeda was responsible.

President Obama’s plan for military spending is supported by top Pentagon brass, while Governor Romney’s plan ups military expenditures by an unnecessary and unpaid-for $2.1 trillion.

Efraim Halevy, former chief of Israel’s spy agency the Mossad, said in two separate interviews on Sunday and Monday that President Obama’s approach toward Iran has been “courageous” and “brave.” Halevy told Al-Monitor that: “Obama does think there is still room for negotiations. It’s a very courageous thing to say in this atmosphere.” Halevy contrasted the approach with Mitt Romney’s:

HALEVY: Negotiating with Iran is perceived as a sign of beginning to forsake Israel. That is where I think the basic difference is between Romney and Obama. What Romney is doing is mortally destroying any chance of a resolution without war. Therefore when [he recently] said, he doesn’t think there should be a war with Iran, this does not ring true. It is not consistent with other things he has said.

Halevy also acknowledged the impact of recent sanctions. During a conversation on Israeli radio on Monday, the former spy chief attributed Iran’s recent economic problems to the sanctions passed by the Obama administration. He told Al-Monitor: “The sanctions have been very effective. They are beginning to really hurt.” These comments reinforce a speech that Halevy delivered at the Wilson Center in Washington, D.C. last Thursday, where he said: “The fact of the matter is the sanctions have not brought the end to the program but sanctions are hurting very much.” Ehud Barak, Israel’s defense minister, has also said that sanctions against Iran have been “effective.” Halevy’s statements undermine the Romney campaign’s claim that President Obama’s handling of the Iran issue has been ineffective and that Romney would be better at the “negotiating table.”

Halevy himself urged negotiations, saying to Al-Monitor: “I realized that dialogue with an enemy is essential. There is nothing to lose. Although the claim was, if you talk to them, you legitimize them. But by not talking to them, you don’t de-legitimate them. So this convinced me, that we all have been very superficial in dealing with our enemies. Not everything you try succeeds. But you have to be willing to try.” His comments come on the heels of a New York Times report that Iran and the U.S. have agreed “in principle” to direct negotiations with each other. When Romney was asked if he supported such an approach, he refused to answer.

Responding to the report, Moshe Ya’alon, Israel’s strategic affairs minister, said that Israel would support direct negotiations if they could halt the nuclear program in Iran.

The Obama administration, along with its European allies, believe that an Iran with a nuclear weapon is a threat and have implemented several rounds of crippling sanctions aimed at finding a diplomatic solution to the Iranian nuclear crisis. The sanctions have resulted in an estimated loss of $48 billion a year in Iranian oil revenues. U.S., Israeli and U.N. officials have repeatedly pointed out that Iran has not yet decided to pursue a nuclear weapon.

Dan Senor, the Romney campaign’s chief foreign policy adviser, said on MSNBC’s Morning Joe today that President Obama stayed “silent” during Iran’s Green Revolution in 2009:

SENOR: The president chose not to weigh in on behalf of dissidents, with the theory you just articulated, that to weigh in would strengthen the regime, and the regime would use that, would argue, you know what the Americans are meddling, they argue that anyways. We didn’t weight in, and Khamenei and Ahmadinejad were still accusing us of weighing in so we stayed out of it, we got nothing out of it, and we let down the dissident movement. We let down the dissident movement. People storm the streets in a country, fighting for freedom and the American president is silent? The American president is silent.

Mitt Romney himself has repeatedly used the line to attack President Obama’s foreign policy. While it might make for a nice soundbite, the argument doesn’t align with the facts. That’s because on June 15, 2009, just two days after post-election demonstrations began in Iran, President Obama spoke out against the Iranian government’s hard-handed crackdown on Iranian activists:

OBAMA: I think it would be wrong for me to be silent about what we’ve seen on the television over the last few days. And what I would say to those people who put so much hope and energy and optimism into the political process, I would say to them that the world is watching and inspired by their participation, regardless of what the ultimate outcome of the election was. And they should know that the world is watching.
And particularly to the youth of Iran, I want them to know that we in the United States do not want to make any decisions for the Iranians, but we do believe that the Iranian people and their voices should be heard and respected.

The President reiterated his comments a day later in another press conference.

OBAMA: What I will repeat and what I said yesterday is that when I see violence directed at peaceful protestors, when I see peaceful dissent being suppressed, wherever that takes place, it is of concern to me and it’s of concern to the American people. That is not how governments should interact with their people. And my hope is, is that the Iranian people will make the right steps in order for them to be able to express their voices, to express their aspirations. I do believe that something has happened in Iran where there is a questioning of the kinds of antagonistic postures towards the international community that have taken place in the past, and that there are people who want to see greater openness and greater debate and want to see greater democracy. How that plays out over the next several days and several weeks is something ultimately for the Iranian people to decide. But I stand strongly with the universal principle that people’s voices should be heard and not suppressed.

While some Iranian protesters did reportedly call for Obama to endorse them more forcefully, what’s missing in President Obama’s initial response is a full-on endorsement of Iran’s reformist candidates in that election, Mir Hossein Mousavi and Mehdi Karroubi. Shirin Ebadi, Iran’s Nobel Peace Prize winning activist, believed this was the right move, saying: “What happens in Iran regards the people themselves, and it is up to them to make their voices heard. I respect his comments on all the events in Iran, but I think it is sufficient.”

Iranian journalist Omid Memarian, who himself was imprisoned by the Iranian government, says Obama rightly decided to not name Mousavi or Karroubi as the protests built up: “If President Obama had publicly supported the pro-democracy protesters, he would have played right into the regime’s hands. The movement would have lost its authenticity in the eyes of a wide range of supporters, irrespective of class, ethnicity, or political beliefs. Remember that in 1953 the CIA helped overthrow the most democratic government Iran had ever seen; for years, the American government also helped prop up the corrupt and feckless government of Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi. It’s no wonder that people in Iran, and the Middle East, are highly suspicious of any U.S. political interference.”

The Republican politicization of the Benghazi attack may have endangered the lives of several Libyan nationals. Rep. Darrel Issa (R-CA), Chairman of the House Committee on Government Oversight and Reform, released 166 pages of documents [PDF] on Friday as part of his investigation into the Obama administration’s response to the Sept. 11, 2012 attack.

That evening, Foreign Policy reported that the documents contained unredacted names of several Libyans working closely with the United States government. In an interview with Rogin, an Obama administration decried Issa’s action as endangering the lives of those named:

“Much like WikiLeaks, when you dump a bunch of documents into the ether, there are a lot of unintended consequences,” an administration official told The Cable Friday afternoon. “This does damage to the individuals because they are named, danger to security cooperation because these are militias and groups that we work with and that is now well known, and danger to the investigation, because these people could help us down the road.”

One of the cables released by Issa names a woman human rights activist who was leading a campaign against violence and was detained in Benghazi. She expressed fear for her safety to U.S. officials and criticized the Libyan government.

“This woman is trying to raise an anti-violence campaign on her own and came to the United States for help. She isn’t publicly associated with the U.S. in any other way but she’s now named in this cable. It’s a danger to her life,” the administration official said.

Among others named in the document were a port manager working with the U.S. to improve infrastructure, as well as various militia members and commanders who share information on other armed groups within Libya. Top Democrats, including Sens. John Kerry (D-MA), Carl Levin (D-MI), and Dick Durbin (D-IL), have slammed Issa for the document dump.

Rep. Gerry Connoly (D-VA), who also sits on the Oversight Committee, likewise issued a statement saying, “The irony is that while Chairman Issa purports to be sincere in his desire to investigate the recent attack so that we can learn how best to protect our diplomats in the future, his own actions have now compromised the safety of U.S. personnel and Libyans working together to forge a better Libya.”

This is not the first time that the Oversight Committee’s Republican majority has possibly exposed sensitive information in the course of their investigation into Benghazi. During the Oct. 10 hearing, Issa and Rep. Jason Chaffetz (R-UT) may have revealed the classified location of a CIA safehouse while viewing an unclassified map.

Issa defended himself and his committee’s actions in a statement last night:

“President Obama should be ashamed of yet another example where his administration has been caught trying to mislead the American people about what happened in Libya,” Issa said in a statement Sunday night. “Obama administration officials and their surrogates are clearly reeling from revelations about how the situation in Benghazi was mishandled and are falsely politicizing the issue in a last ditch effort to save President Obama’s reelection effort.”

“I applaud the bravery of this activist and other Libyans who are willing to speak publicly and work in positions that puts them in regular contact with diplomatic officials,” Issa added. “They deserve better than to have the Obama administration parade them out as part of their election campaign strategy to distract Americans from legitimate questions about the handling of security and the response to a terrorist attack.”

As a spokesman for the Oversight Committee pointed out on Friday, the documents were not classified. However, the Executive Branch has a multitude of designations related to security. The best known are documents that are ‘classified’, be they SECRET or TOP SECRET, with various other interlocking levels of compartmentalization past that. These levels indicate the amount of potential damage to the United States’ national security their release would have and ensure that they remain closely guarded.

Unclassified documents also can receive labels that advise their level of ability for distribution. For example, the documents released by the Government and Oversight Committee were labeled “unclassified, but sensitive,” meaning that while their contents would not harm the United States directly, they are not intended for wide release.

Rep. Issa has been quoted, according a partial transcript released by Rep. Elijah Cummings (D-MD), as referring these unclassified designations as “crap.” Those whose names were published would likely argue otherwise.

Presidential candidate Mitt Romney (R) recently appointed retired General Tommy Franks, who was responsible for some of the greatest failures in the Afghanistan and Iraq wars, to be a top military adviser. That’s par for the course for the Romney campaign, which is littered with planners, organizers, and boosters of the Iraq war.

Romney’s support from the Iraq war’s lead planners reaches to the top. Most of the war’s key players who aren’t advising Romney have strongly come out in support him, lending the imprimatur of their foreign policy instincts to his campaign. Here are some of the key endorsements of Romney or his foreign policy:

DICK CHENEY

WHAT HE SAID ABOUT ROMNEY: “When I think about the kind of individual I want in the Oval Office in that moment of crisis, who has to make those key decisions, some of them life-and-death decisions, decisions as the commander in chief, who has the responsibility for sending our young men and women in harm’s way – that man’s Mitt Romney.”

WHAT HE SAID ABOUT IRAQ : “My belief is we will, in fact, be greeted as liberators.”

DOUGLAS FEITH

WHAT HE SAID ABOUT ROMNEY: “The Obama administration has gone out of its way to try to deemphasize the ideological part of the problem, and to define the conflict as a conflict that the United States has with an organization and its affiliates, rather than an international movement tied together by an ideology. I think Romney did a pretty good job in making it clear that the problem is broader than Al Qaeda.”

WHAT HE SAID ABOUT IRAQ: “What we did after 9/11 was look broadly at the international terrorist network from which the next attack on the United States might come. And we did not focus narrowly only on the people who were specifically responsible for 9/11.”

DONALD RUMSFELD

WHAT HE SAID ABOUT ROMNEY: “Terrific, comprehensive speech by Gov. Romney at [the Virginia Military Institute]. He knows America’s role in the world should be as a leader not as a spectator.”

WHAT HE SAID ABOUT IRAQ: “Freedom’s untidy, and free people are free to make mistakes and commit crimes and do bad things.”

CONDOLEEZZA RICE

WHAT SHE SAID ABOUT ROMNEY: “Our military capability and technological advantage will be safe in Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan’s hands.”

WHAT SHE SAID ABOUT IRAQ: “We don’t want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud.”

GEORGE W. BUSH

WHAT HE SAID ABOUT ROMNEY: “I’m for Mitt Romney.”

WHAT HE SAID ABOUT IRAQ: “Mission accomplished.”

Barack Obama and Mitt Romney will debate foreign policy tonight. We’ve chronicled Romney’s foreign policy positions throughout the campaign here and below are five facts we think you should have on hand during tonight’s third and final presidential debate:

1. New reporting finds that protest against anti-Islam video played role in Benghazi attacks. Facts have been lost in the Republicans’ scramble to politicize the attacks in Libya last month that killed three Americans. It turns out that, according to the latest reports, there’s “no evidence” that the attack was ordered by al Qaeda and the attack grew out of a protest against a video disparaging the Prophet Mohammed.

2. Romney harshly criticized Obama’s pledge to send U.S. troops into Pakistan to get Osama bin Laden. In 2007, Romney attacked Obama for saying he’d order U.S. forces into Pakistan to kill or capture bin Laden, just like he did in May, 2011. “I do not concur in the words of Barack Obama in a plan to enter an ally of ours,” Romney said in 2007. The former Massachusetts governor also said in 2007 referring to bin Laden: “It’s not worth moving heaven and earth spending billions of dollars just trying to catch one person.”

3. Iran is not enriching weapons-grade uranium. Iran is currently enriching low-grade uranium (against the demands of the United Nations), but Israeli and U.S. intelligence and the International Atomic Energy Agency all agree that Iran has yet to decide on whether to build nuclear weapons and enrich to the high grade needed for bomb. Defense Secretary Leon Panetta has said the U.S. and the international community would know if Iran makes that decision and that it would take “a little more than a year” to construct a nuclear device.

4. Romney will increase military spending by $2.1 trillion, with no plan to pay for it. Romney plans on increasing military spending by $2.1 trillion. One adviser repeatedly dodged questions on how Romney plans to pay for it while another said that Romney would maintain war spending indefinitely to make up the cost. CAP has charted the numbers:

5. Israeli leaders have praised Obama’s commitment to Israel’s security: “I don’t think that anyone can raise any question mark about the devotion of this president to the security of Israel,” said Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak. “I think under President Obama we have the best relationship on the issue of security. Never were the security [...] needs better met than today under president Obama,” said Israeli President Shimon Peres.

Republicans blamed President Obama for the killing of four Americans in Libya within hours of the September 11 attack, attributing the violence to the administration’s supposed penchant for “apologizing” and failing to lead in the region. Within days, Republicans charged that Democrats, by arguing that the deaths were caused by a YouTube video disparaging the Prophet Muhammed, were covering up and misleading al Qaeda’s involvement in the deaths and called for U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice’s resignation. During a series of Sunday show appearances on September 16th, she pointedly argued that the attackers took advantage of a protest against the video to carry out the killings.

But now, a growing drumbeat of evidence has found that the administration’s claims were substantiated by the the intelligence community. Eyewitnesses in Benghazi initially told officials and reporters that “members of the group that raided the U.S. mission specifically mentioned the video, which denigrated the prophet Muhammad” and “found no evidence that it was ordered by Al Qaeda.” The CIA also believed that the clip acted as an accelerant for the killings, instructing both Obama and Rice that “The currently available information suggests that the demonstrations in Benghazi were spontaneously inspired by the protests at the U.S. Embassy in Cairo and evolved into a direct assault against the U.S. Consulate and subsequently its annex.” The agency did not change its assessment until September 22.

The new evidence undermines the GOP’s accusations. But rather than back away from the blame game, they’re doubling down on their attacks against the administration. During an appearance on Fox News on Monday, House Homeland Security Committee Chairman Peter King (R-NY) — who led the Republican effort to use the Libya incident as a way to weaken Obama’s foreign policy credentials — insisted that Obama should have questioned the intelligence community’s conclusions and suggested that he pressured the CIA to doctor its findings to fit his re-election narrative:

KING: I want to find out why the president didn’t ask questions….Did they ask the State Department if they had any videos what occurred at the consulate that night? Why with all these threats leading up to September 11th and talking about terror attacks and how could they now be saying it was not a terror attack. I think they’re hiding behind the term intelligence community. To me shows the president did not look into what happened, did not inquire what happened, was willing to look at something face value. Why was the report at face value whether there was so much evidence in there showing it was terrorist attack. It cries out for explanation and investigation. [...]

Who are the individuals or the ones the president claim gave him this information? And did the president steer them in that direction? Was this is mind set by the administration that said Libya was great victory and Al Qaeda was on the ropes and no longer a threat to us?

During an earlier appearance on Laura Ingraham’s radio show, King also suggested that Rice should have known that the intelligence presented to her was false and interrogated the assessments before appearing on that series of Sunday political talk shows. “She’s in the chain of command at the State Department,” he said. “Did she just take that information or did she go to the Secretary of State?”

Reports have indicated that despite the intelligence community’s growing uncertainty about the impetus for the attacks, “intelligence officials didn’t feel they had enough conclusive, new information to revise their assessment” and did not communicate their doubts to Rice before her Sunday show appearances. This assessment was also reflected in Obama’s Presidential Daily Briefings.

Ahead of tonight’s foreign policy debate, former Governor Mitt Romney completely ignored questions about whether he would engage in direct talks with Iran over its nuclear program. Romney was questioned yesterday after performing the coin toss in a flag-football game between his campaign press team and the reporters who travel with him on the stump.

Asked point blank if he would engage in one-on-one talks with the Iranian government, Romney dodged:

[A]n aide quickly jumped in, “Guys this is a football game, come on.”

“I thought you were talking about one-on-one talks with the President, I was about to answer,” Romney said, laughing.

Another reporter asked Romney if he feels ready for Monday’s debate, to which Romney responded, “Ready for football!”

The pointed questions come after reports this weekend that the White House has agreed in principle for the first time to having direct talks with Iran over its nuclear program. These talks would come some time after the Nov. 6 elections, as the Iranians would want to know whether they’d be dealing with an Obama or Romney administration. Such a move would be a major shift in the current negotiating strategy, which revolves around the P5+1 group acting in concert when dealing with Iran.

While denying the initial claim that the talks were already fully agreed upon, National Security Council spokesman Tommy Vietor reminded the press that the Obama administration has “said from the outset that we that we would be prepared to meet bilaterally.”

When asked about it this morning on MSNBC’s Morning Joe, senior Romney foreign policy advisor Dan Senor said he doesn’t need to respond to the question of whether Romney would meet with the Iranians. “The Iranian government and the administration both said this New York Times story is not accurate, so I’m not sure he has to respond to a story that both governments involved have said is not true,” he said.

Romney’s reluctance to discuss his Iranian policy should come as no surprise. He and his campaign have often had trouble differentiating his plans for confronting Iran’s nuclear work with those of President Obama. Meanwhile, campaign surrogate Sen. Lindsay Graham said on Sunday that the “time for talking” to Iran “is over.” Romney is thus left between having to confirm the necessity of talks in agreement with the White House or joining Sen. Graham and others in advocating for war. As the Daily Beast’s Ali Gharib notes, the story “could force Romney to expose himself as just not that into resolving the Iran crisis peacefully.”

Mitt Romney has spent considerable effort trying to avoid foreign policy and national security this campaign season. But when he’s had to engage, he’s forced to strike a delicate balance between satisfying his neocon advisers and right-wing war base on the one hand — while speaking to the rest of the country, which has no appetite for the militaristic Republican policies that have plagued this country since 2001, on the other.

In recent weeks, Romney made good on a promise he made earlier this year to a wealthy donor that he would try to exploit a foreign policy crisis for political gain. “If something of that nature presents itself,” Romney said, referring to the Iranian hostage crisis in 1979, “I will work to find a way to take advantage of the opportunity.” With the attack that killed four Americans at the U.S diplomatic mission in Benghazi, Libya last month, Romney has done just that.

The basis of Romney’s foreign policy critique of President Obama is that Obama went around the world and apologized for America after he became president. Of course, this never happened, but the baseless attack has been a hallmark from Romney’s campaign with respect to foreign policy. Indeed, Romney’s foray into foreign policy has been a bumpy road. Here’s a timeline from throughout the 2012 presidential campaign that lays it all out:

EARLY 2011

– Romney accused President Obama of “mission creep” and “mission muddle” in Libya. “Military action cannot be under-deliberated and ad hoc,” he said. Libyan rebels ousted then-Libyan leader Muammar Qaddafi five months later. (In his book, Romney attacked Obama for appeasing Qaddafi.) [4/21/2011]

– Romney announces he is officially running for president and, in doing so, chides Obama for “leading from behind” in Libya. One wonders if Romney would criticize Nelson Mandela, who once said: “It is better to lead from behind and to put others in front, especially when you celebrate victory when nice things occur. You take the front line when there is danger. Then people will appreciate your leadership.” [6/02/2011]

– Romney says he will let the generals dictate his Afghanistan policy. “I want those troops to come home based upon not politics, not based upon economics, but instead based upon the conditions on the ground determined by the generals,” he said. [6/13/2011]
Read more