Obama fires back at Romney’s talk on Mideast

WASHINGTON: President Barack Obama joined other world leaders at the United Nations yesterday after defending his foreign policy.
The president fired back at suggestions from Republican nominee Mitt Romney that he has been weak with allies and enemies alike.
Obama’s comments were his most direct rebuttal yet to Romney’s criticism of his handling of unrest in Syria and elsewhere in the region.
“If Gov. Romney is suggesting that we should start another war, he should say so,” Obama said in an interview broadcast Sunday night.
Obama will address the annual UN gathering of heads of state today.
In an otherwise tight race for the November election, Obama leads among voters on foreign policy issues. Romney has been trying to undercut that lead as both candidates fight to sway the 7 percent of likely voters who have yet to pick a candidate.
Romney has condemned Obama’s response to unrest in Syria, calling it a “policy of paralysis”.
In a wide-ranging interview conducted the day after US Ambassador to Libya Chris Stevens was killed in an attack on Benghazi, Obama defended his foreign policy successes, noting he’d followed through on a commitment to end the war in Iraq and had stopped Al-Qaeda leader Osama Bin Laden.
His interviews came as Romney’s campaign strove to turn the page on a week of public stumbles dominated by the release of a secretly recorded video that showed Romney writing off his prospects for winning over the almost half of Americans who he said pay no taxes, are dependent upon government.
As the first of three presidential debates approaches in the first week of October, Romney was refocusing his schedule on the election’s most competitive states. He was beginning a three-day bus tour in Ohio followed by a stop in Virginia — states that Obama won in 2008 but that Republicans claimed four years earlier.
The president is not chosen by popular vote but by state-by-state elections, making states that don’t reliably vote Democrat or Republican important in such a tight race.While national polls remain tight, polls in several of the most closely watched states, including Colorado, suggest Obama has opened narrow leads.