Lech Walesa: Romney Will Restore U.S. Leadership

Election 2012: Lech Walesa, the Polish patriot and former president of Poland, and another ally our president has betrayed, endorses the GOP candidate's quest to restore U.S. leadership in the struggle against the world's despots.

Walesa knows a thing or too about resisting and defeating collectivist tyranny, and he has no tolerance for those such as President Obama who appease and apologize to it.

Unlike Obama, he earned his Nobel Peace Prize by leading the Solidarity movement that brought freedom to a Poland that suffered for decades under the Nazi jackboot, then as part of the Soviet gulag.

In May, Walesa refused to meet with President Obama, who had invited him to get together in Poland after the G-8 Summit in France. Obama did not invite him this year to a ceremony awarding a posthumous Medal of Freedom to Jan Karski, a hero of the Polish resistance in World War II. The two have nothing in common. Walesa fights tyranny. Obama appeases it.

During that presentation, our tone-deaf president insulted Poles by referring to "Polish death camps" that were in fact Nazi death camps run by Germany in Nazi-occupied Poland.

"When someone says 'Polish death camps,' it's as if there were no Nazis, no German responsibility, as if there was no Hitler," said Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk. "That is why our Polish sensitivity in these situations is so much more than just simply a feeling of national pride."

Walesa remembers this slight and Obama's betrayal on missile defense after Poland stuck its neck out and agreed to host ground-based interceptors to be guided by missile radar based in the Czech Republic.

They were to counter a future Iranian missile threat. But when the Russians objected, Obama caved.

"Just after midnight I was informed in a telephone call by President Barack Obama that (his) administration had decided to pull out from the plan missile defense shield installations" in the Czech Republic and Poland, Czech interim Prime Minister Jan Fischer related at a press conference in September 2009.

The fact that word of the pullout came on the 70th anniversary of the Soviet invasion of Poland on Sept. 17, 1939, was particularly galling to the Poles.

At the time, the Polish defense minister said, "This is catastrophic for Poland."

In March 2009, Polish Foreign Minister Radoslaw Sikorski noted that Poland had taken "something of a political risk" in agreeing to the deployment of 10 ground-based interceptors on its territory.

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