Officials from the Pentagon and State Department officials were scrambling late Wednesday to deal with a host of immediate challenges: Speeding Marines and anti-terror teams to the region, shipping off vulnerable diplomatic personnel from locations in Libya to Europe, and deploying the FBI to investigate the groups that may have plotted what increasingly appeared to be organized assaults in Benghazi and Cairo.
If they fail, a tragedy could be cast as a leadership breakdown, especially in the increasing political pressure of the fall election. And the hawks were circling, ready to use Obama’s response as another part of the ongoing efforts to paint him as another Jimmy Carter. …
“I’ve said for three-and-a-half years the president doesn’t care about national security. He doesn’t think the world is terribly threatening,” former U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations John Bolton, a Romney adviser, said Wednesday during an appearance on WMAL, a Washington D.C. conservative talk radio station. …
There’s room for a presidential debate on larger Middle East strategy questions, said Peter Feaver, a former George W. Bush White House National Security Council staffer. But the Duke University political science professor agreed that Obama is in good shape with his initial focus on securing the embassies and getting Americans out of harm’s way.
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