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Biden to Romney “Dude, you are so 1975” and “If you Plan war with Iran, tell us Now”

Juan Cole 04/27/2012

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Vice President Joe Biden attacked Mitt Romney’s foreign policy ideas on Thursday.

Romney’s policies are to send tens of thousands of troops back into Iraq, and to antagonize Moscow. He had once said that he wouldn’t pay millions to kill or capture Bin Laden. Biden quipped that if Romney had been president the US auto industry might have been dead but Bin Laden alive.

Biden began by defending Barack Obama on foreign policy, pointing to his withdrawal from Iraq, his plans for drawdown in AFghanistan, his killing of Usama Bin Laden, and the way his administration has raised the esteem of the United States abroad.

Biden said that Romney, who keeps referring to the Russian Federation as the ‘Soviet Union,’ of having a ‘Cold War mindset.’

He also pointed out that when Romney criticizes Obama for not doing enough with regard to Iran, Romney says he will ratchet up sanctions. But actually Obama has subjected Iran to the most severe financial sanctions possible. Biden correctly says that the only thing Romney could do more than Obama is doing, would be to go to war against Iran.

Biden drily remarked that if Romney really intends to go to war with Iran, he has an obligation to tell the American public that: “If that’s [war on Iran] what Governor Romney means by a very different policy, he should tell the American people….”

Romney’s campaign supporters actually inadvertently backed up Biden’s point. Pierre Prosper (a former Bush ambassador), said that Obama had appeased Russia by abandoning the plan for a missile defense in “Czechoslovakia” (try to find that on the map nowadays).

Then former secretary of the navy under Bush, John F. Lehman, expressed the concern that the “Soviets” were benefiting from the Obama administration’s cuts to the US military.

Romney said a few weeks ago that Russia is the ‘number one geopolitical threat’ to the United States, drawing a sharp rebuke from then Russian president Dmitri Medvedev.

Even US Speaker of the House John Boehner criticized Romney for that piece of nonsense.

Romney appears not to realize that the US business elite desperately wants better trade relations with the Russian Federation. The US helped get Russia into the World Trade Organization.

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About the Author

Juan Cole is the founder and chief editor of Informed Comment. He is Richard P. Mitchell Professor of History at the University of Michigan He is author of, among many other books, Muhammad: Prophet of Peace amid the Clash of Empires and The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam. Follow him on Twitter at @jricole or the Informed Comment Facebook Page

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