The Presidential Wing
My opinion on the debate
The Start Off
The third Presidential Debate took place between President Barack Obama and Republican rival Mitt Romney on Monday evening at Lynn University in Boca Raton, Fla.
The debate was moderated by Bob Schieffer of CBS and tackled issues concerning foreign policy. With most Americans focusing on problems at home and in particular the economy, this debate was always threatening to be slightly irrelevant. However, with the race for the White House still wide open, any slight advantage for either candidate could be vital.
GOP candidate, Mitt Romney, was more cordial and less combative than the second debate at Hofstra University on Long Island, even complementing the president on some foreign policy achievements. However, President Obama continued his strong, aggressive method of debating, and by the end there were divided opinions about whether Romney had been too complementary, and also about whether Obama had been too aggressive and "un-presidential."
Ronmey's side of the debate
As I indicated, our objectives are to replace Assad and to have in place a new government which is friendly to us, a responsible government, if possible. And I want to make sure they get armed and they have the arms necessary to defend themselves, but also to remove — to remove Assad.
But I do not want to see a military involvement on the part of our — of our troops.
SCHIEFFER: Well —
ROMNEY: And this isn't — this isn't going to be necessary.
We — we have, with our partners in the region, we have sufficient resources to support those groups. But look, this has been going on for a year. This is a time — this should have been a time for American leadership. We should have taken a leading role, not militarily, but a leading role organizationally, governmentally to bring together the parties; to find responsible parties.
As you hear from intelligence sources even today, the — the insurgents are highly disparate. They haven't come together. They haven't formed a unity group, a council of some kind. That needs to happen. America can help that happen. And we need to make sure they have the arms they need to carry out the very important role which is getting rid of Assad.
Barack's side of the debate
We ended the war in Iraq, refocused our attention on those who actually killed us on 9/11. And as a consequence, Al Qaeda's core leadership has been decimated.
In addition, we're now able to transition out of Afghanistan in a responsible way, making sure that Afghans take responsibility for their own security. And that allows us also to rebuild alliances and make friends around the world to combat future threats. Now with respect to Libya, as I indicated in the last debate, when we received that phone call, I immediately made sure that, number one, that we did everything we could to secure those Americans who were still in harm's way; number two, that we would investigate exactly what happened, and number three, most importantly, that we would go after those who killed Americans and we would bring them to justice. And that's exactly what we're going to do.
But I think it's important to step back and think about what happened in Libya. Keep in mind that I and Americans took leadership in organizing an international coalition that made sure that we were able to, without putting troops on the ground at the cost of less than what we spent in two weeks in Iraq, liberate a country that had been under the yoke of dictatorship for 40 years. Got rid of a despot who had killed Americans and as a consequence, despite this tragedy, you had tens of thousands of Libyans after the events in Benghazi marching and saying America is our friend. We stand with them".