Romney’s Foreign Policy Team, Same As Bush’s.

If you liked our invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan, you will like a Romney administration.

Looking at some of the characters now on his foreign policy team, it includes the same Keystone Cops that were on the Bush team. They are like cartoon characters.

The best know is John Bolton. You may recall him in the Bush Administration. He was one of the principle figures saying intelligence pointed to weapons of mass destruction. They later pushed him over to the U. N. I could see a Romney Administration renewing the search for Iraq weapons of mass destruction on Day One.

For a while, Bush was cute with hints that Iraq was linked to the 9/11 attack. This was promoted by Elliot Cohen, now, too, a Romney insider.

Then, there is Robert Joesph who pushed the false story Iraq had purchased uranium from Niger. It took a while for that story to be become comedy material, but it did.

The uneasy thing about these people is you can almost hear their voices when Romney speaks, just as we could while Bush was President. Romney talks of military action against Iran.

We all have to admit, foreign policy, war and peace and everything involving international affairs must be complicated with much information hidden from those of us in the public. But, after the fact, we can see if mistakes were made.

The Bush Administration looks worse and worse as time goes on. I hope we don’t vote in another team like that one.

Related

Post navigation

27 Responses

Henry

Jon, you left out some facts. The reports of WMDs in Iraq were the result of the 2002 NIE. The 2002 NIE was initiated at the recommendation of…….Democrats. (Report of the Select Committee on Intelligence on Postwar Findings About Iraq’s WMD Programs and Links to Terrorism ANd How They Compared With Prewar Assessments, Page 139).

Henry 4:33 You certainly come up with a lot of stuff that doesn’t count. Are you advising we invade every country that has what you listed, a garage full of stuff that wouldn’t harm people more than a little ways away?

The chemicals reminds me of a sort of personal story. Our son was the right age, needed some money and called to tell us he had signed up for the army reserve during the Irag build up. He went into training to deal with the “chemical warfare” with was the BIG topic of the time. He was at the “grunt” level, but a college educated grunt.

After a few weeks, he told us the “chemical warfare threat” was a big joke and it would never amount to anything. And, so it was.

We have several close friends here in Fargo who are Kurds from Northern Iraq. Their stories of fleeing their villiages to avoid the gas, eventually going to refugee camps and then to Europe and here are ones that have filled many evenings. Of course, many others returned to their villiages. Like all other groups, they argue among themselves about what to do next both in their part of Iraq and Iraq as a whole.

Stan 11:36 I wasn’t challenging you post, just rambling. Obviously, my friends were not gassed. Other kurds were.

I recall the TV stories at the time following the gassing implied Kurds were fleeing Norther Iraq. Our friends, and I guess most of the people they knew, went up to higher ground near where they lived and slipped back and forth to their home for a long time.

If poison gas isn’t a WMD what ius? If he had it then he had it later. Right now people are concerned that WMDs in Syria will fall into the wrong hands. Where did Syria get them? There are more then one credible reports including information from Russian government officials that many of them were moved from Iraq to Syria.

Again you dance around the subject you introduced though. Did Saddam have WMD’s?

Stan 1:29 As my son explained after some military trainging when the press was full of stories hyping the threat of gas warfare, gas is not in the same league as a threat as nucs in modern warfare. If you know the enemy has it, you can predict what he will do and act accordingly. Use of gas is weather dependent.

The gas destroyed did not seem to help Iraq’s army. It did give apologists for the Iraq evasion something to pretend was the WMD which were never found.

Jon: “…gas is not in the same league as a threat as nucs in modern warfare.”

Rock, paper, scissors, dynamite….. Depends. Nukes aren’t a big deal either. Just dig a hole and crawl in if that is what you are afraid of Stay away from the fallout.

Love the attempt at logic though. Nuclear is more potent than chemical, therefore chemical is not to be feared and should be dismissed. Further extrapolating from that is Bush was an idiot because he should have known chemical weapons are not weapons. When weapons are found, no weapons are found. I love it.

Henry 3:51 Only arm chair apologists use the garage sized items found in Iraq as “WMD” finds. Dick Chaney said the WMD were moved out of the country. He didn’t crow, like you do, about the stuff found in Iraq.

Yes they do. So do assult weapons with clips. The kid in CO had one. A few of these and you have the threat from what was found in Iraq.

When you take all the numbers, there is no way to escape that the invasion of Iraq took more lives than it saved. As I posted in Henry’s, if there had been something called “WMD” found, Chaney/Bush would have claimed them. They didn’t.

I never have been able to fugure out why Sadam wouldn’t let the U.N. weapons inspectors to do their job. He would require advanced notice of which buildings etc. that they wanted to inspect. This would lead most people to believe that he was moving something around. Since he had no W.M.D., that was a hugh mistake on his part. It lead to his loss of leadership and eventually his death.

What do you suppose would have happened if everyone knew that he was an empty shirt and that 1) he let someone come into his country and do just whatever they felt like and go wherever they wanted to go and 2) that he had no W.M.D.?

The Kurds in the North of Iraq and on that border, the majority Shi’a population, and Iran would have moved against him immediately.

I agree. As I recall, the conclusion our government made, eventually, about Sadam was that most everything he did was posturing for his neighbors. He seldom had the U. S. or the western world in mind. So, when he gave a lot of resistance to the U. N., it wasn’t because he had something to hide, as we later learned, it had something to do with how he wanted his neighbors to perceive him.

The perception in the U. S. was the U. N. did not have adequate access. Yet, the U. N. people were living there. They had the opportunity to talk to people, read reactions and faces. They looked at lot of places. By the time they left, they knew prettey well what was going on.

Books I read by Iraqis at the time say the way Saddam held back access to the U. N. was the same as how he treated his own staff. People were not allowed access to other parts of the government. That’s why the military itself was surprised when Sadam finally admitted to them he had no weapons of mass destruction.

Do you find sort of a mystery as to what appeals to you to write about on a given day and what does not appeal? I often file through topics that on another day I might choose, but on a particular day it just doesn’t get me motivated. Days later, the same topic is fun.

“When Democrats say Romney is “anti-Israel” or Republicans say Obama is, don’t believe them. If “pro-Israel” means following Binyamin Netanyahu’s lead on all matters relating to the Middle East, they are one and the same. And that is the pity.”

ABOUT

Jon Lindgren taught economics at North Dakota State University and was mayor of Fargo for 16 years. He belongs to the Red River Freethinkers and Iowa Atheists and Freethinkers.
Freethinking is hundreds of years old. Freethinking is about deciding independently rather than accepting the dogma of religious or civic authorities.