Romney adviser (and former Bush adviser) says President Mitt might have prevented embassy attacks

According to a Mitt Romney foreign policy adviser, if Romney were president, the attacks on American embassies and consulates in Libya, Egypt and Yemen might not have happened, not because America would be more popular, but because it would be more feared:

"There's a pretty compelling story that if you had a President Romney, you'd be in a different situation," Richard Williamson, a top Romney foreign policy adviser, said in an interview. "For the first time since Jimmy Carter, we've had an American ambassador assassinated."

Williamson added, "In Egypt and Libya and Yemen, again demonstrations ' the respect for America has gone down, there's not a sense of American resolve and we can't even protect sovereign American property."

You don't have to read very far between the lines to see the kind of foreign policy Williamson is promoting here. He's promoting the foreign policy of his former boss, George W. Bush. And with so many former Bush administration officials on the Romney campaign, it's absolutely clear that Romney foreign policy would be a retread of Bush foreign policy.

By saying that "For the first time since Jimmy Carter, we've had an American ambassador assassinated," Williamson also implies that such attacks on American diplomatic presence did not happen under Bush. But, as TPM's Benjy Sarlin writes, "Numerous deadly attacks on diplomatic compounds in countries like Pakistan, Yemen and Syria took place during the Bush administration."

So this is the Romney campaign's plan on foreign policy: promote a return to George W. Bush policies and hope no one remembers what that actually entailed.

Sat Sep 15, 2012 at 2:56 PM PT (kos): I detailed the attacks on US diplomatic missions during the Bush years here. I counted at least twelve, compared to two for Obama. So in the battle of "who has fueled the least attacks on our diplomats", it's not even close.