The embassy reaffirmed its statement via Twitter even after protesters had stormed the compound. At one point, the embassy had to tweet, pathetically, “Of course we condemn breaches of our compound; we’re the ones actually living through this.”

Late Tuesday night, Romney condemned the thoroughly condemnable embassy press release. In a rapid confirmation of Romney’s wisdom in doing so, the White House threw the embassy’s statement under the bus: “It doesn’t reflect the views of the U.S. government.”

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Overnight, we learned that not one, but four embassy officials, including the ambassador, had been killed in the Libya attack. On Wednesday morning, Romney made a statement and took questions from reporters. He confounded and outraged the assemblage — and liberal pundits everywhere — by not backing off his criticism of the press release that had been implicitly seconded by the White House.

No one should get the vapors over Romney’s critique. Matters of war and peace are inherently political and should always be fodder for political campaigns.

Does anyone remember the Vietnam War? I’m sure Lyndon B. Johnson and Richard M. Nixon would have loved a rule that put debating it off limits. Instead, the protesters and politicians who opposed the war have been lionized for four straight decades.

In 1980, the foreign-policy debate didn’t stop because Americans were held hostage in Tehran. Nor did it stop in 2004 because Americans were fighting and dying in Iraq. Sen. John Kerry used the occasion of the 1,000th death in Iraq to attack everything about the war. One of his ads included the graphic: “2 Americans beheaded just this week.”

In the normal course of things, a state of crisis elevates the foreign-policy debate. While maddening and tragic, the embassy attacks won’t have the enduring significance of Vietnam or Iraq. They do shine a light, though, on the deteriorating U.S. position in the broader Middle East.

The signature Obama foreign policy success has been killing people — Osama bin Laden with a Special Forces raid and a bunch of other Al Qaeda terrorists with drones. Otherwise, we are worse off than when Obama took office.

Consider: Relations with Israel are poisonous. We lost an ally in Egypt, and the revolution there may yet prove Iran 1979 redux. Iraq is sliding into the orbit of Tehran and perhaps back into chaos. Iran is closer to a nuclear weapon. We have made progress in the Afghanistan War but may throw it away with an arbitrary withdrawal, and the Pakistanis hate us more than ever.

Some of this is the president’s fault, some of it is the drift of events. But it’s not the record of a modern-day Metternich.

If this isn’t the time to talk about this record, when is the right time? For the press, politics doesn’t stop at the water’s edge. It stops wherever is most convenient for Obama’s reelection campaign.

Rich Lowry is the editor of National Review.