Is Romney no longer a neocon?
During the debate, Mitt Romney rather consciously played down the neocon rhetoric he had been employing previously. Indicative, I think, of how tired and toxic it is on the public stage. In fact, Romney explicitly distanced himself from both the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, saying: "We donâ??t want another Iraq, we donâ??t want another Afghanistan. Thatâ??s not the right course for us."
Christopher Preble isn't quite buying it:
'Questions remain, however. First, is Mitt Romney truly committed to avoiding Iraq-style wars in the future? If so, why did he choose to surround himself with so many of the warâ??s most fervent advocates? Second, why is he opposed to additional reductions in the Army and Marine Corps, forces that grew specifically to fight the war that was supposed to be a â??cakewalkâ? but that turned out to be something very different? If Mitt Romney doesnâ??t intend to engage in costly, open-ended nation-building missions abroad, why does he need a conventional military geared for that purpose? And, third, what lessons from the Iraq war inform his conduct of foreign policy? Was Iraq a good idea, poorly executed, or was this a bad idea from the get-go?'
One reason that Romney has surrounded himself with pro-Iraq war neocons is because that's largely the GOP policy-making bench these days. While the American people writ large have a dim view of the Iraq war, there are plenty of people in Washington's foreign policy establishment that think it was a great idea, if poorly executed.
That means that, no matter the rhetoric of vote-seeking Romney, the policy proposals generated by a Romney administration are going to be made by the same people who thought invading, occupying and spending $1 trillion on Iraq was a brilliant strategic gambit.