The New York Times reported that the White House is "preparing for a long siege of Arab unrest."
The unrest has suddenly become Mr. Obama’s most serious foreign policy crisis of the election season, and analysts say it is calling into question central tenets of his Middle East policy. Did he do enough throughout the Arab Spring to help the transition to democracy from autocracy? Has he drawn a hard enough line against Islamic extremists? Did his administration fail to address security concerns? Has his outreach to the Muslim world yielded any lasting benefits?These questions come at an inopportune time domestically as Mr. Obama enters the last stages of a campaign season with a measurable lead in polls. His policies escaped serious scrutiny in the initial days after the attack that killed four Americans in Libya last week, in part because of the furor over a statement by his opponent, Mitt Romney, accusing the president of sympathizing with the attackers. White House officials said they recognized that if not for Mr. Romney’s statement, they would have been the ones on the defensive.
The unprecedented wave of violence from Islamist extremists has put the U.S. on its heels in the Middle East and North Africa as the White House scrambles to develop a strategy and a response.
Via @anthropocon's Twitter feed, Fox News had a graphic of just how widespread the American embassy crisis is:
Meanwhile, Al-Qaeda says that the consulate attack in Libya was about "revenge" for U.S. policy in the Middle East. Al-Qaeda in Yemen is now urging all Muslims to kill U.S. diplomats as well.
Yesterday, Katie Pavlich wrote about how the White House's stance that it's "all about a video" flew in the face of all available intelligence, and that the attacks were a "coordinated" "planned operation."