Krauthammer Claims Eruption of Violence in Mideast a Referendum on Obama Foreign Policy

Islamist protesters on Tuesday stormed the U.S. Embassy in Cairo, attacked the U.S. Consulate in Benghazi, Libya, and brutally murdered the U.S. ambassador to Libya and three other Americans.

The White House eventually responded to the attacks with harsh criticism for the poorly made video that supposedly incited the riots and promised to bring those responsible for the murders to justice.

However, conservative columnist Charles Krauthammer believes the remarks from the White House are not only grossly insufficient, but that they are also the embodiment of everything that’s wrong with this administration’s foreign policy.

Moreover, he believes it's these same failed policies and reliance on rhetoric that has led to this explosion of violently anti-American sentiment in the Mideast.

"What we are seeing -- is the meltdown, the collapse of the Obama policy on the Muslim world," Krauthammer said.

The irony is that it began in Cairo, in the same place where the speech he made at the beginning of his presidency in which he said he wanted a new beginning with mutual respect, implying that under other presidents, particularly [George W.] Bush, there was a lack of mutual respect, which was an insult to the United States -- which had gone to war six times in the last 20 years on behalf of oppressed Muslims in Kuwait, Kosovo, Bosnia, Iraq, Afghanistan, and elsewhere.

Krauthammer is, of course, referring to the president’s famous 2009 Cairo speech, which, in retrospect, seems like a terribly failed attempt at "bridge building."

"So to imply that we somehow had mistreated Muslims -- which was the premise of the speech and how the Iraq war had inflamed the Arab world against us -- well, there was no storming of the U.S. Embassy in Cairo in those days," said Krauthammer.

"What we’re seeing now is 'al-Qaidastan' developing in Libya, the meltdown of our relations with Egypt. You’ve got riots in Yemen, attacks on our embassy in Tunisia. This entire premise that we want to be loved and respected and we’re going to apologize has now yielded all of these results, and these are the fruits of apology and retreat and lack of confidence in our own principles," he added.

Watch the discussion here [the entire segment is definitely worth viewing]:

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(H/T: TheDC). Front page photo source courtesy the AP.