This was originally posted at 2010 U.S. Senate candidate Chuck Donovan’s blog, DonovanForLiberty.com. Re-published here with his permission.
The following headline today shows again the Mitt Romney has no new ideas and embraces the same old bad ideas.
“Romney flexes foreign policy stance, calls again for ‘crippling sanctions’ on Iran”
Imagine someone who thinks “bad” children need to be spanked and punished even worse. Romney thinks that leadership means we just have to punish “bad” people even worse. The Iranians refuse to do what we want? Just threaten and spank them even more. They still won’t do what we want? Lets be mass murderers again and bomb them. See, we solved the whole thing.
Here is a better idea. ””Peace, commerce, and honest friendship with all nations-entangling alliances with none.”(1) It isn’t a new idea, just an old one that has yet to be tried, and yet to be offered by the current crop of so-called “leaders”. Only two candidates have offered this idea in 2012. One of them is out of the race. The other is Libertarian candidate Gary Johnson.
Jefferson’s idea doesn’t mean you have to like the Iranians or anyone else. It doesn’t mean you have to agree with them about anything. It just means our first option is not always to send in the Marines.
Here is another reason why more sanctions on Iran is a bad idea. This is from Christopher Hitchens’ article “Iran’s Waiting Game“. (2)
“In September 2002, an editor and columnist in Tehran named Abbas Abdi was among those who helped conduct a Gallup poll that had been commissioned by the foreign-affairs committee of the Iranian parliament, or Majlis. The finding of the poll was that nearly 75 percent of all Iranians were in favor of “dialogue” at the very least with the United States.”
Seventy-five percent of Iranians want to talk with us. Did you catch that part?
Still want to blow them up?
After making a mess of things in Massachusetts, Romney now promises to make an even bigger mess of the United States. His foreign policy ideas aren’t just wrong, they are dangerous. He talks like a man of religious conviction, but his policies are those of a war monger.
We are mired in debt, failed economics, lost liberty, and war. If we don’t vote differently this time it won’t turn out different this time.
Don’t be afraid to let freedom win.
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(1) Thomas Jefferson inaugural address, March 4, 1801
(2) “Iran’s Waiting Game”, Christopher Hitchens, Vanity Fair, July 2005, http://www.vanityfair.com/politics/features/2005/07/hitchens-200507
