Romney’s Campaign Theme Song Could Well Sound Like “Bomb, Bomb, Bomb; Bomb Iran!”
For all those out there who think Obummer is just a sell-out, corporatist shill, balancing on the side of his foot as he leans farther to the right than Shrub, failing us over and over and NEVER giving us those ponies HE PROMISED he would, I maybe have some food for thought.
Oh, I know, we should spare you guys the S.C. canard, as a pureasthedrivensnow commenter huffed over at TBogg’s (who is now mocking the purists on his front page, no less. Snicker.) After all, Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan were just sleight of hand tricks to keep the rubes sweet, right? So I will spare you guys the S.C. canard (though others might not be willing to do that - a great many of them persons with lady parts whose freedom to control those lady parts is in severe jeopardy these days.) No, let’s just talk about something else that Willard (or if not Willard himself, his top foreign policy advisors) have in mind. Declaring war on Iran.
And, oh sure, it’s just Billy Neverbeenrightinhislife Kristol and Jamie Fly, executive director of YetanotherneoconForeignPolicyInitiative arguing in Kristol’s sad rag that America must attack Iran and do it now. And if the president doesn’t have the cojones to do it then Congress, by gum, should do it for him! Now, Kristol has been calling for war with Iran for years and was a staunch supporter of the Iraqi war and even credulously appears to believe that WE WON!! Because THE SURGE!! So arguably this is laughable more than anything else. Where it becomes worrisome is that 3 of the 4 board members of the Foreign Policy Initiative, or FPI, are senior advisors to Willard in developing his foreign policy, uh, positions.
In a detailed article at The Nation, (via) Ari Berman points out that all of Willard’s foreign policy puppetmasters advisers are neocons from the W era including John Bolton, Robert Joseph, Dan Senor and Eric Edelman.
The Romney campaign released the white paper and its initial roster of foreign policy advisers in October, to coincide with a major address at The Citadel. The cornerstone of Romney’s speech was a gauzy defense of American exceptionalism, a theme the candidate adopted from another PNAC founder and Romney adviser, Robert Kagan. The speech and white paper were long on distortions—claiming that Obama believed “there is nothing unique about the United States” and “issued apologies for America” abroad—and short on policy proposals. The few substantive ideas were costly and bellicose: increasing the number of warships the Navy builds per year from nine to fifteen (five more than the service requested in its 2012 budget), boosting the size of the military by 100,000 troops, placing a missile defense system in Europe and stationing two aircraft carriers near Iran. “What he articulated in the Citadel speech was one of the most inchoate, disorganized, cliché-filled foreign policy speeches that any serious candidate has ever given,” says Steve Clemons, a senior fellow at the New America Foundation.
Romney’s team is notable for including Bush aides tarnished by the Iraq fiasco: Robert Joseph, the National Security Council official who inserted the infamous “sixteen words” in Bush’s 2003 State of the Union message claiming that Iraq had tried to buy enriched uranium from Niger; Dan Senor, former spokesman for the hapless Coalition Provisional Authority under Paul Bremer in Iraq; and Eric Edelman, a top official at the Pentagon under Bush. “I can’t name a single Romney foreign policy adviser who believes the Iraq War was a mistake,” says Cato’s Preble. “Two-thirds of the American people do believe the Iraq War was a mistake. So he has willingly chosen to align himself with that one-third of the population right out of the gate.”
But Willard flips and flops more than a newly caught fish pulled into the boat, you might say. How do we know what his real position here is? Which is a good question. So my response would be to ask why he wants to be president to begin with? After all he’s been running for the job for years. He says he’s a businessman but hasn’t been in the private sector since he left Bain Capital. And arguably, if he wanted to be in business, many companies out there would have hired him as a CEO. My theory is that power is what he wants. The President of the United States, is generally considered, rightly or wrongly, to be the most powerful person on the planet. We also know that Willard’s a bully who apparently doesn’t even remember the victims he traumatized, although everyone else involved couldn’t forget. And he has a mean streak. Combine this with the power to drop bombs on brown people and I’m forced to conclude that he’d do it. This may be Willard’s real position.
Posted by marindenver on 06/20/12 at 03:45 PM • Permalink
Categories: Politics • Election '12 • Mittens •
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