New York Times Fact Checks Third Presidential Debate at Lynn University, Florida

Alan: Once again, the "fact checkers" are agreed: Romney misrepresented the truth 

- often grievously - far more often than Obama.

***

New York Times

Fact-Check: Conditions on Foreign Aid

On foreign aid, Mitt Romney has been much more explicit than President Obama: he would make aid to Egypt, and other “Arab Spring’’ states, conditional on how they formed their governments. He has not said what the conditions would be, but aides have: the country has to be tolerant of other religions, enshrine basic human rights, educate girls, preserve peace treaties (especially Egypt’s treaty with Israel) and move toward Western forms of justice.

Mr. Obama has been less specific, but his aides note that cutting aid can become a two-way street. For example, the $1.3 billion in military aid given annually to the Egyptian military was the price of the peace treaty with Israel. Cut the aid and it might be easier to jettison the treaty.

Fact-Check: The Strength of Al Qaeda

Alan: There is a cockroach quality to terrorists. They just keep spawning. Having survived since the Age of Dinosaurs, they are not going away. Obama has made it his business -- unlike Bush and Cheney -- to keep the infestation under control. Reasonably, one would conclude that he is the better candidate to keep them under control in future.

Mr. Romney said Al Qaeda remained “an enormous threat,” and Mr. Obama said his administration had “decimated” its leadership. Who is right? Both are.

The Obama administration has waged a secret war of drone strikes and commando raids against Al Qaeda in roughly a dozen countries and claimed victory in killing not only Osama bin Laden, Al Qaeda’s founder, but also much of the group’s top leadership. Last year Defense Secretary Leon E. Panetta declared that the United States was “within reach of strategically defeating Al Qaeda’’ and that the American focus had narrowed to only 10 or 20 crucial leaders in Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia.

In January, the nation’s top intelligence official, James R. Clapper, testified that continued pressure would likely reduce Al Qaeda’s core leadership in Pakistan to “largely symbolic importance” by 2015.

But even as Al Qaeda central has come under intense pressure in Pakistan, its ideology has spread and given birth to dangerous affiliates in Yemen, Somalia and elsewhere. Michael G. Vickers, the undersecretary of defense for intelligence, has said that even if the United States should kill all of the group’s leadership, “you still have Al Qaeda, the idea.”

The Qaeda affiliate in Yemen, Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, is viewed as the most immediate threat and remains very dangerous, Mr. Clapper said, because political instability has allowed it to seize large areas of southern Yemen. In North Africa, Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb has stepped up kidnapping for ransom and has been bolstered by rebels returning from Libya with heavy weapons.

Last month Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton suggested that there was a link between Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula and the attack at the American diplomatic compound in Benghazi, Libya, that killed the United States ambassador and three others. Officials have said the question of any Al Qaeda involvement would be settled only after the F.B.I. completed a criminal investigation, which could take months.

Candidates Attack and Critique Credentials

Alan: Neither Romney nor Ryan have any foreign policy experience. Zippo. In 2008, Obama - without foreign policy experience - rightly balanced his ticket by choosing a running mate who had spent his long senate career immersed in foreign affairs.

President Obama offered an early, forceful critique of Mr. Romney’s foreign policy credentials, accusing his rival of “wrong and reckless” foreign policy that is “all over the map.”

Coming out quickly to assert his national security credentials, the president repeatedly hammered Mr. Romney as not ready to take over as commander in chief.

“Every time you’ve offered an opinion, you’ve been wrong,” Mr. Obama said. “Not only were you wrong, but you were confusing in sending mixed messages to our troops and to our allies.”

Mr. Romney said the president’s characterizations of his record “don’t happen to be accurate.” And he sought to make Mr. Obama’s critique a negative in the debate.

“Attacking me is not an agenda,” Mr. Romney said. “Attacking me is not talking about how we are going to deal with the challenges of the Middle East.”

But Mr. Romney’s approach in the first few minutes of the debate was far less aggressive, suggesting that American policy in the Middle East should be one of seizing opportunities, not making war.

“We can’t kill our way out of this mess,” Mr. Romney said.

Fact-Check: Romney on Russia

Mr. Obama attacked Mr. Romney for describing Russia as America’s “No. 1 geopolitical foe.”  ”When you were asked what was the biggest geopolitical threat facing America, you said Russia, not Al Qaeda, you said Russia,” Mr. Obama told Mr. Romney during the debate. “And the 1980s are now calling to ask for their foreign policy back.”  Mr. Romney did characterize Russia that way, although he also cited other more immediate security threats.

Mr. Romney’s characterization of Russia is one that has puzzled some Republican foreign policy experts — like Colin Powell, who said, “Come on, Mitt, think,” — as well as some of Mr. Romney’s own foreign policy advisers.

More recently, Mr. Romney seemed to soften his language a bit, saying in a radio interview that Russia is a “geopolitical adversary” but not describing the country as America’s top foe. But Mr. Romney’s concerns about Russia are deep seated. He believes that President Vladimir V. Putin will use political repression to further tighten his grip on power. And, more broadly, he argues that Russia will use its vast natural resources wealth to dominate much of Eurasia.

But some experts say that analysis is backward: They say that Mr. Putin and Prime Minister Dmitri Medvedev have been using high petroleum and mineral prices to support domestic and defense programs, and that those programs are now vulnerable to volatility or even stagnation in commodity prices. Mr. Romney’s critics also say he ignores important help that Russian leaders have provided, like supporting a United Nations heavy-arms embargo on Iran; canceling a surface-to-air missile system sale to Iran; and allowing supplies to be sent through Russia to NATO troops in Afghanistan.

Fact-Check: Arming Syrian Rebels

On the question of whether to arm the Syrian rebels, President Obama and Mr. Romney have a genuine difference of opinion. Mr. Obama has steadfastly refused to give the Syrian rebels heavy weapons to take out President Bashar al-Assad’s fighter jets and tanks, and even light arms have been transferred at the behest of two neighboring Arab states, Saudi Arabia and Qatar.

Mr. Romney said at the debate that he wanted to make sure that responsible groups in Syria receive the arms that they need to defend themselves.  Mr. Obama said that the administration was mobilizing support for the opposition there but that it wanted to make sure that “we’re not putting arms in the hands” of people who could eventually turn them against the United States or its allies in the region.

Administration officials argue it would be madness to give heavier arms to the rebels, because some of the groups are feared to be linked to Al Qaeda. “We did this once before,’’ one of Mr. Obama’s top defense advisers said, referring to the arming of the mujahedeen in Afghanistan in the 1980s, fighters who later took on the United States.

Mr. Romney is far more willing to allow the rebels – at least those who “share our values’’ – to get those arms, as he indicated at a speech at the Virginia Military Institute. But he stopped short of saying the United States would provide those arms directly.

Lurking over these last few weeks until the election is a ground truth: the arms that have flowed to the anti-Assad insurgents so far have gone overwhelmingly to the hardline jihadists.  Efforts by the director of central intelligence, David Petraeus, and others have so far failed to come up with an effective way to vet the rebels, that is, sorting out extremists from secularists. There is no reason to believe it would be any easier in a Romney administration. Figuring out friend from foe in the arms bazaar along the Turkish-Syrian border is virtually impossible, American officials say, and once the arms are transferred, they are hard to track.

Fact-Check: A Quick Note on Geography

A small note on global geography to Mr. Romney.

During a discussion concerning the bloodshed in Syria – and Iran’s role — Mr. Romney said: “Syria is Iran’s only ally in the Arab world. It’s their route to the sea.”

Yes, Syria and Iran are allies. But Iran has a lengthy and sovereign coastline that stretches along the Persian Gulf and the Gulf of Oman, and then linking to the Arabian Sea – which, in turn, leads to the Indian Ocean and onward to the world’s high seas.

Enter Bush and Cheney

Mr. Obama name-checked the former president and vice president, accusing Mr. Romney of praising George W. Bush as a good economic steward and Dick Cheney as good in foreign policy.

That may be the first time Mr. Cheney’s name popped up during a debate this year. The former vice president was one of Mr. Obama’s chief foreign policy critics during the early part of Mr. Obama’s term.

That faded a bit as Mr. Cheney underwent heart surgery. But in recent months, the former vice president has recovered and begun his harsh critiques of the current president’s approaches.

Mr. Bush, by contrast, has largely stayed out of the fray, although his policies have been at the heart of the debate over the direction the country should go during the next four years, as The Times’s John Harwood wrote on Monday.

Fact-Check: Massachusetts Test Scores

Mr. Romney said that grade-school students in Massachusetts, where he served as governor, took the national lead in test scores, because “Republicans and Democrats came together on a bipartisan basis.” Mr. Obama countered, “but that was 10 years before you took office.” They are both right.

The National Assessment of Educational Progress commonly called the nation’s report card, does show that Massachusetts took the top spot shortly after Mr. Romney took office in 2003. But education experts have attributed that to a 1993 school reform law passed under another Republican governor, William Weld, and Mr. Romney, himself, has given that law much of the credit for his state’s progress.

Fact-Check: Debt as a National Security Risk

In the debate, Mr. Romney cited the United States’ growing debt as a major national security risk.

Many analysts share that assessment, including retired Navy Adm. Mike Mullen, the former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. “I believe the single biggest threat to our national security is our debt, so I also believe we have every responsibility to help eliminate that threat,” he said last year. “We must, and will, do our part.”

The general thrust of the argument is that the United States’ huge deficits and debt might force cuts to its spending on human and built infrastructure, as well as research and development. The debt might also undermine confidence overseas in the United States’ ability to lead.

It’s a broad argument about national priorities. But on the more specific question of whether the amount of United States debt held by China poses a threat, the Pentagon has said, generally, no.

Fact-Check: Romney's Shifting Tone on Iran

Mr. Romney’s remark that he wants to use “peaceful and diplomatic means” to persuade Iran not to pursue its nuclear program was a striking departure from the more hawkish tone he has used throughout the campaign.

Mr. Romney urged preparations for war against Iran last year in an opinion piece that he wrote in The Wall Street Journal. “Si vis pacem, para bellum,’’ he wrote. “That is a Latin phrase, but the ayatollahs will have no trouble understanding its meaning from a Romney administration: If you want peace, prepare for war.”

And it was only a few weeks ago that Mr. Romney called for more muscle-flexing aimed at Iran — saying he would “restore the permanent presence of aircraft carrier task forces in both the Eastern Mediterranean and the Gulf region” — in a speech on Oct. 8 at the Virginia Military Institute.

“For the sake of peace, we must make clear to Iran through actions — not just words — that their nuclear pursuit will not be tolerated,” he said.

And Mr. Romney has long been dismissive of Mr. Obama’s attempts to use diplomacy to persuade Iran to abandon its weapons programs.

“In his first TV interview as president, he said we should talk to Iran,” Mr. Romney said in his speech at the Republican National Convention. “We’re still talking, and Iran’s centrifuges are still spinning.”

He spoke out against bilateral negotiations in 2007, saying: “But until there are indications that high-level engagement would do anything other than reward bad behavior, I don’t believe that we should be engaging Iran in direct, bilateral negotiations over their nuclear weapons program. Iran’s nuclear intransigence is repulsive to the entire world, and we shouldn’t let Iran try to position it as an Iran versus a U.S. thing.”

He continued to be dismissive of the diplomatic approach in his 2010 book “No Apology.”

“President Obama sends a signal that he is eager to negotiate at any time, any place, without conditions; the effect of this is to cede all of the power and leverage to our enemies,’’ he wrote. “Time and again, President Obama’s open hand has been met with a clenched fist.’’

Mr. Romney made a similar point in the secretly-recorded videotape of a Florida fund-raiser in which he made headlines for his remark that 47 percent of Americans pay no income taxes and see themselves as victims.

“The president’s foreign policy, in my opinion, is formed in part by a perception he has that his magnetism and his charm and his persuasiveness is so compelling, that he can sit down with people like Putin and Chavez and Ahmadinejad and they’ll find that we’re such wonderful people that they’ll go on with us,” Mr. Romney said.

“And they’ll stop doing bad things. It’s an extraordinarily naïve perception, and it led to huge errors in North Korea, in Iraq, obviously in Iran, in Egypt, around the world. My own view is that the centerpiece of American foreign policy has to be strength.”

And last year Mr. Romney spoke about the possibility of a military strike against Iran in an interview with Fox News. When Bret Baier of Fox News asked Mr. Romney last year what kind of military action he would consider against Iran, Mr. Romney said, “There’s a lot more information I need to have to know what type of military strike would be appropriate and effective.”

“Would you be prepared to do it unilaterally if need be?” Mr. Baier asked.

“Of course,’’ Mr. Romney replied.

Kitty Bennett contributed to this report.

Alan:
It is impossible to figure how Romney would not add 5 trillion to the budget in tax cuts, 2 trillion in Defense spending and another billion if he repealed Obamacare (which he has no intention of doing since the insurance industry -- and the rest of the "big" medical "players" -- want it. Really want it. Without Obamacare, anyone whose cortex folds knows American healthcare is toast.

From Obama, a Sarcastic Retort: 

"We also have fewer horses and bayonets."

The president offered one of the most sarcastic retorts seen during any of the four debates, responding to Mr. Romney’s desire for an increase in the number of naval ships for the United States.

Looking directly at Mr. Romney, Mr. Obama scoffed at the notion.

“We also have fewer horses and bayonets because the nature of our military has changed,” the president said. “We have these things called aircraft carriers, where planes land on them. We have these ships that go underwater, nuclear submarines.”

Mr. Obama was not finished. He described Mr. Romney’s desire for increased naval ships as short-sighted and not in the long-term interests of the military.

“So the question is not a game of Battleship where we are counting ships,” Mr. Obama said. “It’s what are our capabilities?”

Fact-Check: The Size of the Navy

On military matters, Mr. Romney repeated a challenge to the Obama administration that he has used with repeated intensity: that the United States Navy is the smallest since 1917. Yes, today’s Navy is much smaller than in past generations. But Navy commanders also point out that each individual warship at sea today is far more capable than any individual predecessor in that class of vessel. The commander in chief, Mr. Obama, made the same point in the debate, saying that today’s Navy includes aircraft carriers and nuclear-powered submarines far beyond comparison to the fleet early in the last century.

“You mention the Navy, for example, and the fact that we have fewer ships than we did in 1916,” Mr. Obama said to Mr. Romney. “Well governor, we also have fewer horses and bayonets.”

Even so, greater numbers of warships do allow greater presence. But the American economy, the global economy – and Congress, which includes advocates of both increased military spending and of Pentagon cuts – all get a of vote.

Mr. Romney has made what he calls the nation’s underfinanced military a centerpiece of his argument that Mr. Obama has failed to safeguard American strength abroad.

How many trillions of dollars are at stake remains in dispute. Mr. Obama and his vice president, Joseph R. Biden Jr., say Mr. Romney wants to add $2 trillion to military spending, a figure that Mr. Romney’s advisers have rejected as exaggerated. The $2 trillion figure is reached by calculating Mr. Romney’s pledge to spend 4 percent of gross domestic product on the military, which government budget experts put at about $1.8 trillion. Mr. Romney’s advisers point out that this extra spending would not be immediate, but over many years.

In the debate. Mr. Romney did not use, or counter, the $2 trillion figure. He said he would add $1 trillion to the Pentagon budget, by restoring current cuts and preventing deeper spending reductions under sequestration. He seems to have gotten that number by adding together the $450 billion-plus defense spending cuts proposed by the Obama administration, over the next decade, with the approximately $500 billion in cuts that would be required if Congress fails to reach a budget accord.

But that second cut, under a program called sequestration, has not happened yet – and both Democrats and Republicans are trying to avoid it. Mr. Obama responded by pledging that sequestration would be avoided, and he stressed that the Joint Chiefs of Staff had signed off on current budget proposals.

Fact-Check: How Close Is Iran to a Bomb?

Damon Winter/The New York TimesMitt Romney responded to a question during the debate in Boca Raton, Fla.

Mr. Romney said at the debate that Iran was “four years closer to a nuclear weapon.” How close is that?

The answer depends on three factors. The first is how long it would take Iran to manufacture bomb-grade uranium. The second is how long it would take to fashion that uranium into a weapon – without getting caught, and getting bombed, along the way. And the third is how long it would take to make the weapon small enough to fit atop a Shahab III, Iran’s longest-range missile.

Right now the Iranians have enough low-enriched and medium-enriched uranium on hand to make five or six bombs – but it would require further enrichment, and they would almost certainly be caught by international weapons inspectors, who visit Iran’s enrichment facilities every few weeks.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel argued in a recent speech in front of the United Nations that Iran would be ready to make a short, perhaps undetectable sprint to a bomb by next spring. American officials agree, but say the sprint would be hard to hide. So far, Iran’s stockpile of 20 percent enriched uranium – the closest to bomb grade – is short of a single bomb, and the amount was reduced recently because some was diverted to fuel a research reactor used for medical purposes. But Iran is working to make more.

Then comes the next part of the process: “weaponizing.” The physics is not that hard, but again, the risk of detection is fairly high. Obama administration officials say the United States would almost certainly detect what was happening. The Israelis are not so sure – especially because weapons labs can be hidden in caves, tunnels or university laboratories.

Even then, Iran would have only a crude bomb – something it might put on a cargo ship, but nothing that could be aimed with precision. That process would take a year or more, and involve engineers who would most likely have to redesign Iran’s missile warheads.  “We’d see them coming,” one senior intelligence official said.

But that does not guarantee they could be stopped: The United States saw China, India, Pakistan and North Korea becoming nuclear powers, and decided in each case that it was not worth a war to stop them.

Fact-Check: Sanctions on Iran

Mr. Obama has a lot of history on his side with his assertion that Iran’s economy is being crippled by sanctions imposed over the past few years and that Iran’s oil sales have plummeted. Mr. Romney called for tightening them more. 


“We put in the toughest, most crippling sanctions ever,” Mr. Obama said.

Until Mr. Obama came to office, the United Nations sanctions on Iran were pretty ineffective. There were travel bans on some scientists linked to the missile and nuclear programs, and restrictions on some banks. Sales of sensitive equipment were blocked. But the sanctions did not go after the heart of the Iranian economy: oil sales. Mr. Obama toughened them, step by step, making it hard for Iran to get access to dollars, to get international loans and even to deliver oil. He pressed some of Iran’s biggest customers to buy oil elsewhere. Even today, scores of loaded Iranian oil tankers are bobbing off the country’s coast, with nowhere to go.


The result is that the sanctions in place today are far greater than they were under President George W. Bush. But could they be tighter still, even
 “crippling,” to use the phrase Mr. Romney likes? (He borrowed it from Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton.)

Certainly they could – but only
 if other countries agree. Because the United States has not had diplomatic relations or any significant trade with Iran for more than three decades, this is all a matter of persuading allies and others, and giving them an alternative to Iranian oil. Mr. Romney has not said how he would do that.



What Mr. Obama can’t say is that while he ratcheted up the sanctions, he also expanded the covert program to sabotage Iran’s nuclear centrifuges – a highly classified program called Olympic Games. It introduced cyberweapons – a computer worm – to destabilize the machinery, buying a bit more time for sanctions to work – but not much. The Iranians have now recovered, however, and are producing new nuclear fuel at a steady rate, despite sanctions and sabotage.

Obama Responds to Romney on 'Apology Tour'

There is almost nothing that makes Mr. Obama angrier than the accusation that he went on an “apology tour” early in his administration.

And Mr. Romney went there.

Responding the Mr. Obama’s defense of his foreign policy in the region, Mr. Romney accused the president of taking “what I’ve called an apology tour.”

Mr. Obama’s eyes flashed with anger that was palpable. He said that nothing Mr. Romney said was true.

Mr. Obama said that the “apology tour” accusation was “probably the biggest whopper that has been told during the course of this campaign.”

Mr. Romney refused to relent, saying that Mr. Obama had flown to the Middle East — and skipped a trip to Israel in the process.

He said the president told the world that “America had been dismissive and derisive.” He looked at the president and said, “America has not dictated to other nations.”

In response, Mr. Obama shot back that as a candidate, he had taken a trip to visit troops abroad, unlike Mr. Romney. He also said that he visited Israel — and its Holocaust museum — and noted that Mr. Romney had met with donors in Israel.

The president also described visiting an Israeli border town that suffered repeated missile attacks from terrorists.

“That’s how I’ve used my travels,” the president said. “The central question st this point is going to be who is going to be credible to all parties involved?”

Fact-Check: 'Apology Tour'

Mitt Romney stated that President Obama went on a foreign “apology tour.”  Is this true? News organizations have repeatedly found the claim that Mr. Obama has apologized for American values and principles to be inaccurate.

While Mr. Obama has admitted American failings at times — and, like President George W. Bush, has apologized for specific acts of American wrongdoing abroad — he has never explicitly apologized for American values or principles.

Republicans have sought to use a number of excerpts from Mr. Obama’s speeches or interviews to make their case that he has. One of the most commonly used is a 2009 speech in France in which Mr. Obama said that “there have been times where America has shown arrogance and been dismissive, even derisive.” But critics typically ignore what Mr. Obama said next: “But in Europe, there is an anti-Americanism that is at once casual but can also be insidious. Instead of recognizing the good that America so often does in the world, there have been times where Europeans choose to blame America for much of what’s bad.” In other words, Mr. Obama was saying that the United States and Europe had at times each dealt unfairly with each other — he never said he was sorry for American values or diplomacy.

In February, Mr. Obama did apologize to the Afghan president, Hamid Karzai, after American military personnel were involved in burning copies of the Koran, an episode that spawned violence throughout Afghanistan. But his expression of regret came after Marine Gen. John R. Allen, the American commander in Afghanistan, had already apologized. It also brought to mind the apology then-President Bush made in 2004 to King Abdullah of Jordan for abuses at Abu Ghraib prison.

In an interview in February with Fox News, Mr. Romney seemed to object to the Koran-burning apology, saying, “For us to be apologizing at a time like this is something which is very difficult for the American people to countenance.”

Fact Check: Romney's Bipartisan Success:

Earlier in the debate, Mr. Romney said that bipartisan cooperation with an overwhelmingly Democratic legislature allowed him as Massachusetts governor to balance the state’s budget for four straight years and propel the state’s schools to first in the nation on standardized tests. Many experts, however, say those claims are less than fully credible.

Mr. Romney’s assertion that he and the legislature came together to balance Massachusetts’s budget omits the fact that the state constitution requires a balanced budget. And despite his statement that bipartisan cooperation with the legislature helped propel Massachusetts schools to first in the nation, most experts agree that the state’s academic successes are rooted in school reform promoted a decade earlier by another Republican governor, William F. Weld.

Mr. Romney did propose education reforms during his term as governor from 2003 to 2007. But by and large, they failed to become law. “I don’t think he put any major effort into sweeping education legislation that would be his,” said Paul Grogan, who as head of the Boston Foundation headed an education reform commission created by Mr. Romney. Asked what happened to the report that his commission produced, he replied: “Nothing much. It didn’t go anywhere.”

Alan: The reason Governor Romney had some measure of success with Massachusetts 87% Democratic legislature -- although he also vetoed eight hundred pieces of legislation --was because the legislature was 87% Democratic. Democrats are constitutionally inclined to compromise, whereas Republicans - or at least the new-fangled "breed" that threw Dick Lugar out of office -- are absolutely unable to compromise. This same democratic inclination to compromise enabled Ronald Reagan to work with Tip O'Neill and his Democratic Congress. For Romney to take credit for this Democratic virtue is like a fellow having sex with his dowdy, disinterested wife at 10 p.m. and then, at midnight, another roll in the hay with his gorgeous, irrepressible mistress. In the morning, he says to his wife: "Honey, I want to thank you for everything you've done. Last night, I had the best sex in my life." 

Fact-Check: Leaving Afghanistan in 2014?

Mr. Obama said at the debate that he wanted to “transition out of Afghanistan in a responsible way.”  But when is the United States leaving?  In every major conversation with the Afghans and the Pakistanis, American officials talk about their plans for an “enduring presence” of American troops — mostly behind high walls — who would stay in Afghanistan for years to come.

None of this is exactly a state secret. The opening paragraph of the White House fact sheet on the summit meeting last May in Chicago among NATO nations in Afghanistan, for which the United States provides the lion’s share of the troops, reads:  “NATO Heads of State and Government agreed to an enduring partnership between NATO and Afghanistan that would last beyond the transition of full security responsibility for Afghanistan” from the international security force to Afghan forces.

“At the Chicago Summit, leaders reaffirmed this partnership, sending a clear message to the Afghan people that as they stand up to take responsibility for their own country, they will not stand alone,” it said.

No one says, at least officially, how big that enduring force would be. But the internal estimates cited by American officials in recent interviews run from 10,000 to 15,000 troops. That would include a counterterrorism force, probably made up of special forces and training forces. They would be there to keep the Afghan security forces on track and to act as a trip wire to keep the Taliban from taking Kabul, if they ever threatened the capital again. It includes drone operators, so that the United States can keep patrolling the skies and, on occasion, launch missile attacks inside Pakistan or in Afghan territory.

And, least discussed of all, it includes bomb-search teams and other specialists to keep an eye on Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal. There is no bigger concern inside the Obama administration than how to respond if a Pakistani weapon or nuclear material goes loose, and after a 2009 scare – when the White House briefly thought the Pakistani Taliban might have gotten nuclear material – President Obama has been insistent that the United States be in a position to respond quickly, according to interviews with current and former administration officials.

Of course, the “enduring presence” has not been agreed to yet by the Afghan government. It could fall apart, as a continuing presence in Iraq did. But many in the administration believe that President Karzai will have little choice, given the weakness of his own forces.

Fact-Check: Troops on the Ground in Syria

Mr. Romney said at the debate that “we don’t want to have military involvement” in Syria. And with that statement, he essentially put himself in a place pretty close to where President Obama and Mr. Biden have been: that America’s options are limited if putting ground troops into the country is off the table.

The essence of Mr. Romney’s argument was that the Obama administration had acted too slowly, and given Russia a veto at the United Nations. But that veto — which the Russians have as a member of the Security Council — wasn’t about taking military action against Bashar al-Assad, the Syrian president who is clinging to power. It was about sanctions.

So in the end, the two sides seemed to come out in the same place: the only event that would prompt America to go into Syria was the need to secure its chemical weapons stockpiles. Anything short of that was not worth the risks.

Fact-Check: 'Let Detroit Go Bankrupt'?

Mr. Obama just stated that when Mr. Romney argued in late 2008 that Detroit auto companies should be denied a government bailout and instead turn to the private marketplace, no private financing was available. This isconsistent with what auto executives have said.

At the time Mr. Romney wrote his now infamous New York Times op-ed the financial markets had ground to a halt. It was November 2008, and there was little available liquidity for anyone seeking financing. There were certainly no financial institutions — not even Bain Capital, Mr. Romney’s private equity firm — looking to invest to the tune of the $80 billion the car companies needed at the time.

No private companies would come to the industry’s aid, and the only path through bankruptcy would have been Chapter 7 liquidation, not the more orderly Chapter 11 reorganization that the company ultimately followed, people inside and outside the car companies have said.

In fact, the task force asked Bain if it was interested in investing in General Motors’ European operations, according to one person with direct knowledge of the discussions.

Bain declined, this person said, speaking anonymously to discuss private negotiations.

On China, a Partner and an Adversary on Trade

Mr. Romney went out of the way to praise China, saying that the largest country in the world wants “the economy to work and the world to be free and open.”

But moments later, he once again vowed that, “On Day 1, I will label them a currency manipulator.”

The dueling messages were apparently an effort to talk about China as a “partner” but also to say that it needs to follow trade rules that keep things fair.

“We can work with them. We can collaborate with them,” Mr. Romney said.

That echoed what Mr. Obama said about China. He called the country “an adversary but also a potential partner in the international community if it is following the rules.”

But Mr. Obama aggressively accused Mr. Romney of investing in companies that ship jobs to places like China and of opposing trade complaints about cheap Chinese tires being dumped in America.

“We put a stop to it and as a consequence saved jobs throughout America,” Mr. Obama said. “Those workers don’t feel that way. They feel as if they had an administration who was finally going to take them seriously.”

Fact-Check: Mission Creep in Libya

Mr. Obama noted more than once that Mr. Romney had called the Obama administration’s intervention in Libya “mission creep” and “mission muddle.” Here, Mr. Romney can make a strong case.

When NATO and the Arab League went into Libya in 2011, it was to protect the population against the forces of Muammar el-Qadaffi, which were promising to hunt down Mr. Qaddafi’s opponents “like rats.” But nowhere was regime change – deposing Mr. Qaddafi – an explicit, agreed-upon goal. It became a de facto one: NATO officials said the population could not be secure if it thought Mr. Qaddafi would come back to power. Soon, they were chasing the leader around the Libyan desert.

Eventually he was found – pulled from a ditch and shot. Washington did not exactly protest. But while there was mission creep, whether the outcome was a “muddle’’ depends on what the West intended. Mr. Obama made clear from the start that he did not plan to send in American ground troops or remain in Libya to try to shape the society. In fact, he stayed out – and Mr. Romney now argues that contributed to the death of Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens and three other Americans at the consulate in Benghazi.

Mr. Obama pressed his case for removing Mr. Qaddafi from power. “Imagine if we had pulled out at that point,” he said at the debate, noting that Mr. Qaddafi “had more American blood on his hands than any individual other than Osama bin Laden.

Military Policy in the Pacific

As part of his focus on Asia, Mr. Romney would build more military ships – 15 a year to Mr. Obama’s 9 or 10 – although he has not provided a detailed explanation of how he would pay for them beyond substantially increasing the defense budget. Of those 15 ships, Mr. Romeny would like three to be submarines. A Virginia-class nuclear-powered attack submarine costs more than $2 billion.

In the midst of all the charges and countercharges, it is important to remember that China is not equipped to mount a frontal military challenge to the United States. China’s total military budget in 2010 was an estimated $160 billion – roughly a tripling since the 1990s. By comparison, the Pentagon spent more than $500 billion in 2010, or closer to $700 billion if the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are included. Although the estimated 1.25 million ground troops of the People’s Liberation Army make it the largest in the world (there are about 750,000 active-duty United States Army soldiers and Marines), there is a vast difference in training and ability.

Still, nearly all of China’s spending is Asia-focused while only a portion of American defense spending is. And in lessons learned from the Soviet Union, American defense officials say the Chinese are not trying to compete comprehensively with the United States, but “asymmetrically,” where they have an advantage – the Pacific.

Fact-Check: Romney Position on Troops in Afghanistan

Has Romney changed his view on an Afghan withdrawal and timeline? Yes, about an hour into the debate, Mr. Romney seemed to tweak his long-held position on Afghan troop withdrawals.

In the past, he has said that while he wanted to follow the same 2014 withdrawal timeline as the Obama administration and NATO allies, he would seek the advice of military commanders on the ground before making a decision. This prompted critics to suggest that Mr. Romney was giving himself wiggle room to keep regular combat brigades in Afghanistan past 2014. (Both the Obama administration and the Romney campaign have talked about keeping a small residual force, presumably of special operations forces and military trainers, after 2014 — if the government of Afghanistan allows it.)

But Monday night, Mr. Romney seemed to draw a much clearer line that he would take all regular combat troops out of Afghanistan by 2014 – without the caveat of first asking military commanders whether they believed that was a good idea.

In response to a question about whether he would withdraw troops even if it were obvious that the Afghans were not able to handle their own security, Mr. Romney said, “We’re going to be finished by 2014, and when I’m president, we’ll make sure we bring our troops out by the end of 2014.”

He made no mention of first getting input from military commanders, as he has in the past in response to similar questions. “We’re going to be able to make that transition by the end of 2014, so our troops will come home at that point,” Mr. Romney said.

Auto Bailout Accusations

If there’s one thing that gets Mr. Romney angry, it’s being accused of wanting to let the American auto industry go bankrupt.

After Mr. Obama repeated the accusation, Mr. Romney insisted on a retort.

“Never,” he said, describing himself as a “son of Detroit.”

He insisted that he supported a “managed bankruptcy” and said that what ended up happening is what he called for.

Mr. Obama would not let the comments pass. He insisted that “you keep on trying to airbrush history.”

The president insisted that Mr. Romney would not have provided government assistance to the auto companies, which the vast majority of economists say would have meant the companies would have had to liquidate.

“You said they could get it in the private sector,” Mr. Obama said, noting that it would never have happened that way.

Mr. Obama said the fact-checkers would quickly check out who was right, a point that Mr. Romney agreed upon. ***

Fact-Check: Fund-raisers in Israel

After Mr. Romney complained that Mr. Obama had not visited Israel during a trip to the region, Mr. Obama responded by contrasting the trip he took to Israel as a candidate with the one that Mr. Romney took as a candidate.

Mr. Obama said: “when I went to Israel as a candidate, I didn’t take donors. I didn’t attend fund-raisers. I went to Yad Vashem, the Holocaust museum there, to remind myself the nature of evil and why our bond with Israel will be unbreakable.”

He was alluding to Mr. Romney’s remarks this summer at a fund-raiser in Israel, where he offended Palestinian leaders by suggesting that cultural differences explain why the Israelis are so much more economically successful than Palestinians. The remarks drew strong rebukes from Palestinians who noted that Mr. Romney had failed to mention the years of trade restrictions imposed by Israel.

Mr. Romney was speaking at a fund-raiser with prominent Jewish-American backers in July when he mentioned that he had been influenced by “The Wealth and Poverty of Nations,” by David S. Landes, which argues that culture is the defining factor in determining the success of a society.

“Culture makes all the difference,” Mr. Romney said. “And as I come here and I look out over this city and consider the accomplishments of the people of this nation, I recognize the power of at least culture and a few other things.”

He added: “As you come here and you see the G.D.P. per capita, for instance, in Israel, which is about $21,000, and compare that with the G.D.P. per capita just across the areas managed by the Palestinian Authority, which is more like $10,000 per capita, you notice such a dramatically stark difference in economic vitality. And that is also between other countries that are near or next to each other. Chile and Ecuador, Mexico and the United States.”

In fact, the share of the gross domestic product per capita in the West Bank was estimated to be $2,900 in 2008, the most recent year available, according to the C.I.A. World Factbook. Israel’s has been about 10 times as high in recent years, according to the agency. The agency said that in the West Bank, “Israeli closure policies continue to disrupt labor and trade flows, industrial capacity, and basic commerce, eroding the productive capacity of the West Bank economy.”

Mr. Romney’s remarks, which were first reported by The Associated Press, drew a swift rejoinder from Palestinian leaders. Saeb Erekat, a senior aide to President Mahmoud Abbas of the Palestinian Authority, told the news agency that “it is a racist statement and this man doesn’t realize that the Palestinian economy cannot reach its potential because there is an Israeli occupation.”

Fact-Check: Romney Investments and Outsourcing

Mr. Obama accused Mr. Romney of investing in companies that shipped jobs overseas. Is this true?

In short, yes. Bain Capital, the private equity firm Mr. Romney founded and whose funds remain a big part of his portfolio, has invested over the years in a variety of companies that moved jobs overseas, as detailed in a Washington Post article that ran this summer.

The attack line Mr. Obama used in the debate is actually a tweak of a stronger one the Obama campaign had previously used against Mr. Romney, accusing him of being more directly involved in shipping jobs to Asia and elsewhere through Bain, as opposed to being a mere passive investor.

Fact-checkers, including Politifact.com, FactCheck.org and The Washington Post’s Fact Checker column, had questioned the more direct line of attack on outsourcing, because most of the companies cited by the Obama campaign were investments that occurred after Mr. Romney had left day-to-day management of Bain in 1999 to run the Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City. Mr. Romney was indisputably involved with at least one Bain-owned company that outsourced jobs overseas — to China, in particular — the Holson Burnes Group, a picture frame and photo album manufacturer that Bain owned from 1987 to 1995. But FactCheck.org, which examined the issue, pointed out that it is unclear whether the company’s outsourcing increased or decreased under Bain, or if the manufacturing overseas came at the expense of American jobs.

The question of whether Bain Capital ever invested in such companies, with Mr. Romney benefiting as an investor, is a much less controversial one. Besides the companies mentioned in the Washington Post article, a recent New York Times article highlighted another example: an auto parts manufacturer, Asimco Technologies, shut down two camshaft factories in Michigan and went on to make the same parts in China.

Fact-Check: 'Obamacare' and Military Spending

When Mr. Romney was asked how he would find the money to pay for the increased military spending he seeks, he said: “We do it by getting — by reducing spending in a whole series of programs. By the way, No. 1 I get rid of is ‘Obamacare.’ ”  But repealing the health care law would actually increase the federal deficit.

This summer, after Republicans in the House of Representative passed a bill to repeal the law, the Congressional Budget Office estimated that doing so would increase the federal deficit by $109 billion over the next decade. That is because the parts of the law that would require more spending to expand coverage would be offset by the parts of the law that raise new revenues and curb spending — including provisions calling to curb the growth of Medicare costs and several new taxes and fees. Repealing the law would also mean that 30 million fewer people would have health insurance in 2022, it projected.

Fact-Check: Trade Cases Against China

President Obama said, “We have brought more cases against China for violating trade rules than the other — the previous administration had done in two terms.” It is true that the Obama administration has brought eight cases against China in the past four years — an average of two a year — before the World Trade Organization.

The tariff on Chinese-made tires, imposed unilaterally by the Commerce Department, makes nine challenges. In eight years under President George W. Bush, the United States brought seven cases — or an average of one a year since China joined the World Trade Organization.

Fact-Check: Drawing 'Red Lines' on Iran

At some points in the campaign, there has been a clear difference in where Mr. Obama and Mr. Romney would draw a “red line’’ beyond which they would not let Iran go toward a nuclear weapon. But more often than not, it has been more like a red smudge, giving both candidates maximum flexibility, while each tries to sound more determined to stop the Iranian program.

Mr. Obama’s position has been the most consistent. He has said consistently that Iran would not be permitted to get a nuclear weapon. But when pressed about whether the United States would block Iran from getting a weapons “capability” – that is, to obtain the fuel and technology to stop just short of obtaining a weapon – he said, “I’m not going to parse that.” And he hasn’t.

Mr. Romney, in contrast, has parsed it – but inconsistently. He usually says he will not allow Iran to have the capability, or to be, as his aides put it, just a few screwdriver turns away from a bomb. But in an interview last month with George Stephanopoulos of ABC, Mr. Romney forgot his own position and made it sound as if he and Mr. Obama were on the same page. A few days later he went back to his old formulation.

It sounds like a small difference, but it is a huge one – technologically and politically. Many experts believe Iran only intends to go up to the line of a weapon, stopping a step or two short. That would enable it to stay inside the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, of which it is a signatory. And it would make it harder for Israel, or the United States, to mount an attack that gained global support. Moreover, a “capability” may be all Iran needs, in a world where a virtual bomb brings with it almost as much symbolic power as a real one.

But Mr. Obama is being vague for a reason. “He doesn’t want to agree to a certain amount of uranium, or a certain deadline, that triggers a war,” one of his aides said last month. “He needs room to resolve this peacefully.”

Fact-Check: Trade War With China

Mr. Romney said that the United States was currently engaged in an unacknowledged trade war with China — and that China was winning, as evidenced by its trade imbalance with the United States. Many economists agree that what is happening now are skirmishes on the sidelines, not a full-scale trade war in which both sides lose heavily.

Trade experts say that perhaps 90 percent of trade between the United States and China is unaffected by the current trade disputes. In fact, the United States and China are much more economically interdependent than any listener to these three debates might think. In today’s multinational supply chain, both imports and exports support American jobs, according to trade experts like Dan Ikenson of the Cato Institute, a nonprofit research organization in Washington that focuses on libertarian issues.

A 2007 study of one fifth-generation iPod showed how the trade deficit figure can be misleading. For every $300 iPod that was sold in the United States, the study said, the trade deficit with China rose by $150, the factory cost. But in fact, China probably only added a few dollars to the product’s value because companies headquartered in Japan, the United States and elsewhere made the high-value components while China only assembled them.

A study a year ago by the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco argued that despite China’s export juggernaut, Americans still buy American. It concluded that 88.5 percent of the goods and services purchased by ordinary Americans were produced in the United States. Chinese products accounted for only 2.7 percent of personal consumption expenditures in the United States.