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Max Boot Blames George W. Bush!

Exit polls indicate that Obama beat Romney 56 percent to 33 percent among voters who considered foreign policy their top issue. Little surprise to TAC readers of course, but it is interesting to see how Republican foreign policy types are explaining this. Max Boot (one of the uberhawks who surrounded Romney during the campaign) offers this: But, […]

Exit polls indicate that Obama beat Romney 56 percent to 33 percent among voters who considered foreign policy their top issue. Little surprise to TAC readers of course, but it is interesting to see how Republican foreign policy types are explaining this. Max Boot (one of the uberhawks who surrounded Romney during the campaign) offers this:

But, whatever the polls say, future Republican presidential candidates would be well advised to undertake a real effort to explain their foreign policy positions to the country and to reestablish foreign policy credibility which, to some extent, has been frittered away by George W. Bush’s early mistakes in Iraq. It may be unfair to hold an entire party responsible for one president’s mistakes—and not to give Bush proper credit for rescuing the situation in Iraq with the surge—but Republicans will have to recognize that that’s the way it is.

I see: the “entire party’s” poor reputation in foreign affairs rests upon “George W. Bush’s early mistakes in Iraq.” Oh, those “early mistakes.” Nothing to do with the group of intellectuals and publicists who had been pushing for an Iraq war for a decade before the 2003 invasion, filled their publications and much of the mainstream media with lies about Saddam’s nuclear weapons, — this mostly as an apertif  to to get the juices flowing for a war against Iran, their (and Israel’s) principal target. Nothing whatsoever to do with Cheney, or Rumsfeld, or Paul Wolfowitz, or the Project for a New American Century, or Commentary, or the author’s own bellicose imperialist tub-thumping in the Weekly Standard. Just George W. Bush and those oh so regrettable “early mistakes.”

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