Romney Adviser: Libya Attack Never Would Have Happened Under Romney

Benjy Sarlin

A top foreign policy aide to Mitt Romney suggested Thursday that the deadly attack on the U.S. consulate in Libya that killed Ambassador Christopher Stevens would never have happened if Romney were president. There wouldn’t even be anti-American protests in the Middle East if Romney were in charge, the aide said.

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He blamed the attack that killed Stevens on Obama’s handling of the region, arguing that the Muslim world would have held the hypothetical Romney administration of 2008-2012 in much greater esteem, which would have prevented violent protests over an anti-Muslim film like the one that led to Stevens’s death.

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Williamson served as an official under President George W. Bush. Numerous deadly attacks on diplomatic compounds in countries like Pakistan, Yemen and Syria took place during the Bush administration. When countries around the world were engulfed in protests over Danish cartoons depicting the prophet Muhammad, the Bush administration condemned the material as “unacceptable” even as it repeated the United States’s dedication to free speech.

The United Nations, where Williamson served as a diplomat, suffered a massive attack in 2003 when a truck bomb in Iraq killed 22 people including the U.N.’s top envoy to the country at the organization’s headquarters. The international body withdrew nearly its entire staff from the country for several years.

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