Ayoon Wa Azan (If he wins the election he will destroy what is left)

Over the past week, and in preparation for the second televised debate between the two contenders for the U.S. presidency, Mitt Romney attacked the foreign policy record of Barack Obama, accusing him of failing to protect U.S. interests and security. Romney is the Republican candidate. The last U.S. president that represented Romney was George W. Bush, who waged three losing wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and the War on Terror, and who brought ruin to the U.S. economy, unleashing a global financial crisis. Obama inherited this heavy burden. He went on to withdraw the U.S. troops from Iraq, and began to withdraw them from Afghanistan. During his term, Osama bin Laden was eliminated. His only war was thus against the House of Representatives, which is dominated by the Republicans who chose to let the economic suffering of the Americans continue in order to blame Obama for what the ignorant president and their party had perpetrated against America. What is Romney’s foreign policy like? My answer is that he knows nothing about it that would qualify him to run it, representing the world’s only remaining superpower. His only experience in foreign affairs comes from a foreign tour in the summer, which he began by insulting the English when he claimed they did not know how to run an event like the Olympic Games, before the London Games turned out to be the most successful in decades. Then on the same tour, he said that the Palestinians were responsible for their tragedy and that they want to destroy Israel. In response, the UN General Assembly received Palestine’s representative, President Mahmoud Abbas, with eight standing ovations inside and outside the hall during his speech, something that no other speaker was ever met with. Before these two gaffes, Romney stated on numerous occasions that he considered Russia to be the primary enemy – or foe – of the United States. At the Virginia Military Institute, Romney delivered a speech that we can consider to be his foreign policy program. Its main gist is that he wants to increase military spending in a bankrupt country, with a pledge to provide heavy weapons to the Syrian opposition to topple the regime, and subsequently defeat the latter’s ally Iran. Romney seems to believe that he knows more than the Arab countries that want to topple the Syrian regime too, but are afraid to see the heavy weapons fall into the hands of the terrorists. These terrorists now operate openly in Syria, and undermine the national opposition’s work. It seems that details are not included in the calculations of the Republican candidate, who also promised to work to build democracy in Libya and capture the terrorists who carried out the attack on September 11 this year, and killed the U.S. ambassador Christopher Stevens along with three other diplomats. While this is indeed a logical policy, it happens to be identical to the declared policy of the Obama administration, and Romney does not say how he intends to do things differently. I dare say that Mitt Romney is the ally of war criminal Benjamin Netanyahu, and wants to use American lives and money as fodder for the plots concocted by the Israeli prime minister against the Arabs and Muslims. For the first time in two months, Romney is ahead in the polls as a result of his lies, which means that he will lie again today. If Romney wins the race to the White House, he will destroy what is left of America’s economic and military power. Here I will rely on the first debate between the two candidates, which had focused on the economy, to make my point. Romney won the debate because he lied and lied, and most American viewers are not informed enough to realize that Romney tricked them. I will set my own opinion aside and choose from the best available American references, beginning with the prominent economic authority and Noble Prize winner Paul Krugman, who wrote an article in the New York Times the day after the debate, entitled “Romney’s Sick Joke”. Krugman said that Romney’s healthcare plan does not cover pre-existing conditions as he claimed. He asked the question whether Romney was lying, and said that he was either lying, or making a sick joke, among many other deceiving points he made during the debate. Unemployment figures were then released two days after the debate, on Friday October 5, showing unemployment falling to 8 percent, the lowest level since Obama took office. Krugman confirmed these numbers to be valid and not a plot, as the supporters of the Republican candidate claimed. At the same time, The Washington Post carried an editorial entitled “The $5 trillion man”, in which it said that while President Obama has no adequate plan to bring down the debt the U.S. government is accumulating, Republican nominee Mitt Romney has a plan to make it worse and raise it by 5 trillion dollars – which explains the title of the editorial. The New York Times, meanwhile, said that Romney’s policies are similar to Obama’s, and where they differ, they threaten to take the country in a wrong and even dangerous direction. Today, the second debate will take place. I know that Romney will lie and be deceptive, and I wait for the polls tomorrow to see whether he will manage to trick the voters again, or whether they will not be fooled by him, twice. --- The views expressed by the author do not necessarily represent or reflect the editorial policy of Arabstoday.