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Why Benghazi is not Obama’s Carter moment

By Peter Foster US politics Last updated: September 12th, 2012

Republicans have rushed to compare the US Embassy attacks in Cairo and Benghazi with the 1979 Iranian hostage crisis that arguably sunk Jimmy Carter 1980 re-election. You can see the temptation, but the comparison is both silly and cynical – for the following reasons.

First, and most obviously, the 1979 crisis lasted 444 days. This one is likely to last about 4 days. The contrasting scale of the two events is so obviously dissimilar as to render the comparison (which Newt Gingrich was making again on CNN this morning) counter-productively ludicrous.

Second. Despite attempts by Republicans to hit Obama for ‘leading from behind’ the US public clearly do not seem him as a Jimmy Carter figure and this event isn’t going to change that.

Obama, who has double-digit leads on foreign policy has successfully painted himself as the steely-eyed hit-man erasing Al Qaeda’s top operatives from a safe distance one at a time.

Mitt Romney, leaping in last night to call the Obama administration ‘a disgrace’ last night over-played his hand, showing once again how ham-fisted his campaign is. You can’t score points before the bodies are cold.

Third, and most importantly of all, Obama is out-polling the Republicans on national security and foreign policy because he’s doing exactly what the America’s war-weary public wants: reducing boots on the ground while keeping the Al Qaeda threat neutralized without putting more US service personnel in harm’s way.

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Go out on the campaign trail and the message is clear: so long as you can keep us safe, then forget nation building, stop bankrupting with on futile wars and – as one Republican voter told me last week – ‘let these people blow themselves up in their own countries if they want to’.

Absent a clear and defined revenge target, the events in Benghazi, far from driving call for further interventions, will for many only reinforce the popular view that it’s time to stop spending blood and treasure in places like Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria and Iran.