Way back in 2007

Way back in 2007, Mitt Romney predicted exactly what’s happening in Iraq today

Author
By Robert Laurie

Over the last 7 days, we’ve witnessed the utter collapse of Iraq. Virtually everything we fought for has come crumbling to the ground. We’re told that President Obama is weighing all the options, and will soon make a decision about how to go forward.  Usually, under the current administration, the process of presidential decision making takes around two months.



Obama watches, waits, and eventually - when it becomes politically infeasible to stall any longer - he does something. Most of the time this occurs long after the problem is too far gone to solve.

This is called “the considered response.”  He’s taking “the measured approach.”  He’s “carefully weighing all the variables” and doing so takes time. After all, no one could have predicted that, if we weren’t extremely cautious in our efforts to stabilize and withdraw from Iraq, the current situation would come to pass.

Except someone did predict this.  In fact, they predicted it with almost 100% perfect clarity, and they did so way back in 2007. That’s right, someone pegged the current state of Iraq while George W. Bush was still in office.

That person was Mitt Romney:

“You could see in the Shia south, the Iranians reaching over and grabbing to take power. You could see in the Sunni northwest, the Al-Qaeda folks taking power and leadership in that area. You could see the unrest among some of the Kurd populations and surrounding countries, perhaps destabilize the border of Turkey. And it’s even possible that you might think a regional conflict in the Middle East may occur.”



To be fair, Romney was not the only person making this prediction.  It was painfully obvious that the situation in Iraq was, at best, extremely delicate. Many predicted that a U.S.-created power vacuum would lead to collapse.

Fast forward to 2012.

If Democrats were to be believed, Romney was nothing more than a bumbling rookie. Despite heading for his second term with mediocre approval ratings and a still paper-thin resume, Obama was a genius. On the other hand, Mitt Romney was supposed to be an untested political neophyte whose concepts of foreign policy were a throwback to the 1980’s. He was mocked mercilessly when he - again correctly - predicted the current situation in Ukraine. Worst of all, he had the audacity to be rich.

So, he was ignored and lost an election - largely because members of his own party refused to vote for someone they deemed “not conservative enough.”

There’s a lesson here for those who care to learn it.

You will never get a candidate with whom you agree 100%.  It just isn’t going to happen.  You may hate the “lesser of two evils” argument but, if you’re a Republican who stayed home in 2012, you should ask yourself this question: “Would the U.S. be even somewhat better off had this man won the White House?”