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MR. ROMNEY: Well, my strategy's pretty straightforward, which is to go after the bad guys, to make sure we do our very best to interrupt them, to— to kill them, to take them out of the picture. But my strategy is broader than— than that. That's— that's important, of course, but the key that we're going to have to pursue is a— is a pathway to— to get the Muslim world to be able to reject extremism on its own. We don't want another Iraq. We don't want another Afghanistan. That's not the right course for us. The right course for us is to make sure that we go after the— the people who are leaders of these various anti-American groups and these— these jihadists, but also help the Muslim world.
And how we do that? A group of Arab scholars came together, organized by the U.N., to look at how we can help the— the world reject these— these terrorists. And the answer they came up was this.
One, more economic development. We should key our foreign aid, our direct foreign investment and that of our friends— we should coordinate it to make sure that we— we push back and give them more economic development.
Number two, better education.
Number three, gender equality.
Number four, the rule of law. We have to help these nations create civil societies.
But what's been happening over the last couple years as we watched this tumult in the Middle East, this rising tide of chaos occur, you see al-Qaida rushing in, you see other jihadist groups rushing in.
And— and they're throughout many nations of the Middle East.
It's wonderful that Libya seems to be making some progress, despite this terrible tragedy, but next door, of course, we have Egypt. Libya's 6 million population, Egypt 80 million population. We want— we want to make sure that we're seeing progress throughout the Middle East. With Mali now having North Mali taken over by al-Qaida, with Syria having Assad continuing to— or to kill— to murder his own people, this is a region in tumult. And of course Iran on the path to a nuclear weapon. We've got real gaps in the region.
MR. SCHIEFFER: We'll get to that, but let's give the president a chance.
