Mitt Romney got to show off some his foreign policy chops while campaigning in South Carolina.
The former Massachusetts governor said the U.N. Human Rights Council has repeatedly condemned Israel while taking no action against nations with repressive regimes.
“The United Nations has been an extraordinary failure of late,” Romney said in response to a question at a pancake house along the coast of early voting South Carolina. “We should withdraw from the United Nations Human Rights Council.”
Pandering to the far-right, anti-U.N. sentiment notwithstanding, Romney doesn’t know what he’s talking about. The United States can’t withdraw from the Human Rights Council — we don’t have a seat on the human rights council. The Bush administration has been boycotting the human rights council for quite a while.
Taking a step back, I actually understand mistakes like this one. Romney has very little experience in government, and no working understanding of foreign policy. He was just popping off yesterday, hoping to score a few cheap points, bashing an institution he doesn’t really know anything about.
What I don’t understand is what it takes for a Republican to earn the “gaffe prone” label.
Looking back through some of my notes, a few Romney doozies stand out:
* In April, Romney told ABC’s Good Morning America that he would “set a deadline for bringing the troops home” from Iraq — but only if it’s a secret deadline that “the enemy” couldn’t see. It was a ridiculous comment, which Romney quickly dropped from his talking points.
* Also in April, Romney took a passive attitude towards the terrorist responsible for 9/11. “It’s not worth moving heaven and earth spending billions of dollars just trying to catch one person,” Romney said of Osama bin Laden. He later said the opposite.
* In May, Romney said it is “entirely possible” that Saddam Hussein hid weapons of mass destruction in Syria prior to the 2003 invasion. (Charles Duelfer and the Iraq Survey Group know better.) Romney quickly dropped this position, too.
* Also in May, Romney explained how he perceives threats to the U.S. from the Middle East, conflating all of our rivals into one: “This is about Shi’a and Sunni. This is about Hezbollah and Hamas and al Qaeda and the Muslim Brotherhood. This is the worldwide jihadist effort to try and cause the collapse of all moderate Islamic governments and replace them with a caliphate. They also probably want to bring down the United States of America.” None of this made any sense.
* In June, during a debate, Romney made the bizarre assertion that IAEA weapons inspectors were not allowed entry into Saddam Hussein’s Iraq. Reality shows the opposite is true.
* In August, Romney told a group of voters that military service and campaign service are effectively equivalent in terms of serving one’s country. He later backpedaled.
* In October, asked about getting congressional authorization during a crisis with Iran, Romney said “the lawyers” would tell him what to do.
And now Romney insists that we withdraw from a U.N. Council of which we are not a part.
Hearing this made me think of the summer, when Barack Obama said he would pursue high-value terrorist targets in Pakistan and would not use nuclear bombs against al Qaeda. In both instances, the media labeled the comments as “gaffes” — even though neither position was particularly controversial nor wrong — which reinforced the agreed-upon inexperience-narrative. To this day, we still hear some talk about Obama’s “problems” with foreign policy over the summer.
And yet, here’s Romney, allegedly one of the more learned Republican presidential hopefuls, who can barely go a month without saying something fairly ridiculous about foreign policy. I shudder to think what the coverage would be if a Democratic candidate had a rhetorical record like his.
It’s almost as if there’s some kind of double-standard, driven by the notion that foreign policy is a GOP “strength,” so Romney’s embarrassing mistakes don’t matter as much.