Mitt Romney, Dick Cheney, Condi Rice and Other Scary Stories

By Andrew Rosenthal, The New York Times

14 July 12

ith all the white noise of a presidential campaign, we need as many clues about a candidate's judgment as we can get. Like a record on foreign policy, for example.

Mitt Romney does not have one. He's said a lot of absurd things, mostly parroting the vapid GOP talking point that President Obama has not been a leader on the world stage. He says he'll stop Iran from getting a nuclear weapon, but he won't say how, because of course he has no ideas that Mr. Obama and, frankly, President Bush, haven't already tried.

He'd probably be more loyally supportive of Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu than Mr. Obama has been, which will make some constituencies happy but will do nothing to create peace between Arabs and Israelis. On Afghanistan, Pakistan and the whole bunker of issues related to terrorism and American national security, I haven't heard anything to indicate that Mr. Romney has any fresh ideas, either.

What I have heard is some pretty scary stuff about whom Mr. Romney considers to be the right kind of person to consult on foreign policy.

Last night, at a fundraiser for Mr. Romney in Wyoming with a $30,000 cover, former Vice President Dick Cheney said Mr. Romney was the "only" man who could make the right decision in a foreign policy crisis. (Beats me how he exactly knows that.)

Mr. Romney, in turn, praised Mr. Cheney as a "great American leader." (He didn't mention that other guy who served on the Cheney team, the lesser-known George W. Bush.)

Today, the Drudge Report was floating a rumor that Condoleezza Rice, who was Mr. Bush's national security adviser and then his second secretary of state, was on the vice presidential short list for Mr. Romney. I took that with a huge grain of salt, given the source, but Ms. Rice recently endorsed Mr. Romney and gave a speech at one of his many special evenings for multi-millionaires.

And The Nation recently reported that 70 percent of the people listed as Romney foreign policy advisers worked for Mr. Bush. That's pretty disturbing, even when you consider that Mr. Bush was president for eight long years and had gone pretty through the right-wing foreign policy crowd.

Mr. Cheney, you may recall, was a primary architect of Mr. Bush's pointless, bloody and wildly expensive war with Iraq. He was at the epicenter of the fabrication of "evidence" that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction, and he still claims it did. He drove the reckless expansion of executive power that led Mr. Bush to the illegal detention of prisoners, torture and warrantless wiretapping, among other things.

Ms. Rice was also complicit in the presentation of false evidence about Iraqi weapons of mass destruction to Congress and the American people. She was there while Mr. Bush and Mr. Cheney poisoned American relations with pretty much all of our long-time allies. And there was her infamous appearance before the 9/11 Commission in which she said there had been no reason to respond to an intelligence report entitled "Bin Laden Determined to Strike in US."

I'm not saying that Mr. Bush, Mr. Cheney and Ms. Rice could have prevented the 9/11 attacks. But their actions afterward were deplorable. Mr. Romney turning to them now for advice would be like Groundhog Day, except that involves either a semi-cute furry animal or a charming movie with Bill Murray and Andi McDowell. That story, at least, had a happy ending.