Hat tip commentor GBear for the link to Steve Benen at Maddowblog, where Romney “didn’t forget Poland, but he skipped Afghanistan“:
[My emphasis] As has been amply documented (thank you Mr. TBogg), Romney is very publicly in favor of American military prowess keeping foreigners in line, as long as such prowess doesn’t involve actually serving in the military or paying taxes to support those who do. Despite some long-after-the-fact pieties about how much he regretted not going to Vietnam, Romney’s only foreign service at the time involved living in a chateau in France and failing to make converts to Mormonism. (Setting the template, I suppose, for his future failure to impress snooty foreigners despite his visual prosperity as a proof of the Mormon God’s favor.) During his earlier failed presidential run, Romney explained that his five military-service-eligible sons were better deployed “serving their country” by working as Daddy’s campaign surrogates.… The schedule called for a three-country trip: U.K., Israel, and Poland, in that order. But given that Romney has no foreign policy experience, no background in military affairs, and no real credibility on anything related to national security, I figured he’d have to make an unannounced stop in Afghanistan — or at a minimum, to a U.S. military base somewhere in Europe.
In fact, I assumed Romney would stop in Afghanistan but had to keep the trip under wraps in advance due to security concerns, which would have been entirely understandable.
But he didn’t go. In fact, shortly before he departed, one of Romney’s policy advisors appeared on MSNBC and said “real Americans” don’t want to talk about the war in Afghanistan anyway. It’s the longest war in American history, and three months before Election Day, no one seems to know exactly what Romney’s position is on U.S. policy in Afghanistan…
Putting aside the merit of Romney’s vague ideas about government, does he fully understand the nature of the position he’s seeking?
Does he realize that a president, especially during a time of war, can’t simply choose which areas of interest will be important to him, and leave national security behind altogether?
If Romney takes the oath of office in January, he’ll have tens of thousands of American troops on the ground in Afghanistan, fighting a war that began so long ago, he was still a liberal Republican at the time. Does anyone have the foggiest idea what he intends to do with those troops and/or how long he intends to keep them there?
It seems like Romney’s handlers really didn’t think about his “No Apologies, Just Gaffes and Insults” tour as a matter of foreign policy. Willard went to London to bask in the media-intensive glow of the Olympics, then to Israel and Poland to check off the proper boxes on the “religious believers and working-class ethnic white swing voters” appeasement list. Right now the military in general and the Afghanistan/Iraq fiascos in particular are not in wide rotation on the evening infotainment shows, so Romney and his neocon advisors saw no point in wasting time better devoted to assuring the expat One Percenters that Mitt felt their pain. Everything outside the Privilege Bubble was just Disney World but with more annoying papparazzi. I suppose Romney figures that all those faceless unfortunates in the green uniforms are just more production units in yet another underperforming branch of the Amercia(tm) megaconglomerate, interchangeable meatpuppets to be discarded when he takes over the corner office and breaks up the profit centers for maxium efficiency.
Romney: (Some) Politics Stops At the Water’s EdgePost + Comments (45)