{"id":18635,"date":"2012-05-02T14:27:12","date_gmt":"2012-05-02T10:27:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/mideastposts.com\/?p=18635"},"modified":"2012-05-02T14:28:16","modified_gmt":"2012-05-02T10:28:16","slug":"romneys-middle-east-so-who-is-the-enemy-mitt","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mideastposts.com\/showcase\/romneys-middle-east-so-who-is-the-enemy-mitt\/","title":{"rendered":"Romney’s Middle East: So, Who is the Enemy, Mitt?"},"content":{"rendered":"

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Mitt Romney said Monday that of course he would have taken out Bin Laden<\/a>\u00a0and that \u2018even Jimmy Carter would have made that call.\u2019<\/p>\n

Since Jimmy Carter ordered a brave and risky but failed military mission into Iran, that was a cheap shot on the part of someone who has never had anything to do with the military. Moreover, Jimmy Carter made peace between Egypt and Israel and\u00a0played a major role<\/a>\u00a0in reducing the number of Africans stricken by the\u00a0Guinea worm from 3.5 million to 1,100<\/a>. So Romney, who has mainly been sending our jobs overseas, isn\u2019t good enough to shine Carter\u2019s shoes.<\/p>\n

Moreover, Romney is forgetting\u00a0what he said about Obama when Bin Laden was killed<\/a>:<\/p>\n

\u201cI think the president deserves credit for approving a relatively high-risk entry into the country with helicopters and special operations personnel, Navy SEALs,\u201d Romney said. \u201cThat was the thing that proved to be successful.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

So at the time, Romney acknowledged that Obama made the decision, and that it was a high-risk strategy that he approved (advisors such as Joe Biden preferred a missile strike).<\/p>\n

Romney was pushing back against the Obama campaign\u2019s use against him\u00a0of his 2007 statement in which Romney<\/a>:<\/p>\n

\u201cSaid the country would be safer by only \u201ca small percentage\u201d and would see \u201ca very insignificant increase in safety\u201d if al-Qaida leader Osama bin Laden was caught because another terrorist would rise to power. \u201cIt\u2019s not worth moving heaven and earth spending billions of dollars just trying to catch one person,\u201d Romney said. Instead, he said he supports a broader strategy to defeat the Islamic jihad movement.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The problem with Politifact\u2019s fact check on Romney here is that it doesn\u2019t understand what Romney meant by the \u2018Islamic jihad movement.\u2019 In a 2007 primary debate,\u00a0Romney explained<\/a>:<\/p>\n

\u201d Romney: We\u2019ll move everything to get him. But I don\u2019t want to buy into the Democratic pitch that this is all about one person \u2014 Osama bin Laden \u2014 because after we get him, there\u2019s going to be another and another.<\/p>\n

This is about Shia and Sunni. This is about Hezbollah and Hamas and Al Qaida and the Muslim Brotherhood. This is a worldwide jihadist effort to try and cause the collapse of all moderate Islamic governments and replace them with a caliphate.<\/p>\n

They ultimately want to bring down the United States of America.<\/p>\n

This is a global effort we\u2019re going to have to lead to overcome this jihadist effort. It\u2019s more than Osama bin Laden.<\/p>\n

But he is going to pay, and he will die.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Romney is saying that he wouldn\u2019t move heaven and earth to get Bin Laden, but that he would spend billions and have a strategy to fight the Muslim movements he names, or perhaps the whole Muslim world (\u201cShia and Sunni\u201d). But note that \u2018Shia\u2019, followers of the Shiite branch of Islam, reject the Sunni notion of a caliphate (a kind of early Muslim papacy, which no longer even exists), so he is simply incorrect in lumping Shiite Hizbullah with the Sunni groups. And, it also isn\u2019t true that Hamas (a Sunni national liberation movement focused on Palestine) or the Muslim Brotherhood (focused on national politics in Egypt and Syria) are dedicated to a caliphate. Rather, their energies are devoted to national politics in each state, and they don\u2019t have a common leadership across nation-states. Romney incorrectly sees Muslim fundamentalism as all one thing, as though in Christianity you lumped Mormons, Evangelicals, ultramontane Catholics, and Joseph Kony\u2019s Lord\u2019s Resistance Army all together and accused them of working jointly for global political rule by the Pope.<\/p>\n

Romney is a scary conspiracy theorist when it comes to the Muslim world, and his discourse in this regard is eerily similar to that of European far-right figures such as Anders Breivik, the Norwegian mass murderer.<\/p>\n

The truth is very different. As it now stands, Hizbullah leader Hassan Nasrallah has formally renounced the idea of making Lebanon an \u2018Islamic Republic,\u2019 and noted that he was young and inexperienced when he once talked like that over a decade ago. Hizbullah, representing Lebanon\u2019s Shiites, has members of parliament and cabinet positions and backs the current Miqati government, so it is part of the Lebanese political establishment. Is Romney going to declare war on Lebanon?<\/p>\n

And, the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt now controls the elected parliament of that country. Is Romney going to declare war on Egypt?<\/p>\n

Moreover, the Muslim Brotherhood of Syria is a key actor in the current revolutionary movement in that country. Does Romney prefer leaving the secular Baath party of dictator Bashar al-Assad in power in Damascus?\u00a0But no<\/a>:<\/p>\n

\u201d Scott Pelley: Governor Romney\u2013 Governor Romney, if I may ask you a 30 second follow-up to that. Is it time for the Assad dictatorship to end? Would you use mili\u2013 tel\u2013 military force to do that?<\/p>\n

Mitt Romney: Of course it\u2019s time for the Assad dictatorship to end. And we should use covert activity, as Speaker Gingrich has just indicated. Look\u2013 the\u2013 the reason I disagree with Ron Paul on this is\u2013 that you have, in Syria, a nation which is an ally, the only Arab ally, of Iran. It is arming Hezbollah. It represents a\u2013 an access\u2013 of\u2013 of great significance to Iran. And as a result, because of our concern about Iran, and their effort to become the Hageman in the Middle East, it is important for\u2013 for us as a nation to stand up and to help those efforts to\u2013 to replace A\u2013 Assad. And that means helping Turkey and\u2013 and\u2013 Saudi Arabia, who are putting pressure on him, as well as covert activity of our own.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

So in practice, Romney is allied with the Syrian Muslim Brotherhood and, get this,\u00a0Saudi Arabia<\/strong>. In his litany of Muslim fundamentalist movements he wanted to spend billions of dollars to fight (as an alternative to focusing on Bin Laden), Romney pointedly did not mention Wahhabi Islam, the branch predominating in Saudi Arabia, which is substantially to the right of the Muslim Brotherhood!<\/p>\n

The old Muslim fundamentalist movements have for over a decade been being drawn into parliamentary, Westminster-style politics. Romney, who seems to recognize this tendency with regard to Turkey, can\u2019t see it in Egypt, Tunisia and elsewhere.<\/p>\n

So the real problem with Romney is not that he would not have taken out Bin Laden. It is that he sees the Muslim world as in the grip of a congeries of pan-Islamic Caliphate movements against which he wants to wage a Mormon jihad with trillions of dollars of taxpayer money. But in fact almost none of the movements he mentions has anything to do with al-Qaeda or a Caliphate. Romney supported Hosni Mubarak to the hilt and opposed the Arab Spring. He doesn\u2019t understand the youth movements sweeping the Arab world. He lumps all kinds of unrelated, and changing, Muslim movements together with al-Qaeda. He doesn\u2019t even seem to understand that if he works to get rid of the al-Assad regime in Syria, he likely will be bringing the Muslim Brotherhood to power there, one of the groups he is sworn to fight as fiercely as he would Bin Laden.<\/p>\n

The problem with Romney is that when it comes to the Muslim world, he doesn\u2019t have the slightest idea what he is talking about, and seems intent on alienating 1.5 billion Muslims, a fifth of the world. He wanted to substitute a crazy conspiracy theory for a tactical approach to getting Bin Laden and the al-Qaeda leadership. In this regard, the Obama campaign has correctly nailed him, but they haven\u2019t gone far enough in emphasizing the truly creepy character of his obsession with Muslims in general, far beyond the fringe al-Qaeda element.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

JUAN COLE: Romney clearly doesn\u2019t have the slightest idea what he is talking about, and seems intent on alienating 1.5 billion Muslims<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":70,"featured_media":18636,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[56,83,82,135],"tags":[1832,169,8014,1103,513,4376,1376,703,18300,1211,2652,11660,227,6379,2734,2323,18306,18311,2021,6560,18309,8011,191,1353,389,6799,12676,973,583,1747,1808,10677,18275,18330,12675,18322,18325,18302,1212],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mideastposts.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18635"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mideastposts.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mideastposts.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mideastposts.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/70"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mideastposts.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=18635"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mideastposts.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18635\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mideastposts.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/18636"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mideastposts.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=18635"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mideastposts.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=18635"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mideastposts.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=18635"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}