“Romney: Clinton’s Wrong About Bush”
New York Times - 1/29/2007
COLUMBIA,S.C. — Mitt Romney, the former governor of Massachusetts seeking the Republican nomination for president, has no shortage of criticism of the way the war in Iraq has been handled. And he questions whether President Bush was sending enough troops in, and dispatching them quickly enough, to accomplish the stabilization of Bagdad.
But Mr. Romney said he did not agree with Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton, the New York Democrat, that President Bush needed to resolve the war he started before he left office and not hand it off to his successor, as she said while campaigning in Iowa on Sunday.
“She can do what she likes – but I take exception to her conclusions,” Mr. Romney said in an interview while campaigning across this state today. “I don’t think we should run our foreign policy based upon elections, election schedules or anything of that nature.”
“We should look at the interests of America and our friends and our citizens and our solders and do what it’s our collective best interests. This president has taken action which he believes is calculated to make America a safer land. We should not make decisions based on an election schedule.”
Mr. Romney has been a supporter of the war effort from the start, and said that he supported pressing on as long as there was a “reasonable probability of success.” He argued that the United States should not move to the next two most likely options – partitioning the country or pulling out completely – until it had tried to stabilize Iraq by sending slightly more than 21,000 troops in.
“I would not move to those choices unless we were convinced there was no prospect of success with the current strategy,” he said.
Mr. Romney and one of his main rivals for the Republican presidential nomination, Senator John McCain, both have come out in favor of Mr. Bush’s plan to send in more troops. Both Mr. McCain and Mr. Romney have indicated they would have preferred to see more troops sent in to accomplish this mission.
In the interview, Mr. Romney said based on his consultations with generals and other military experts, he thought 30,000 troops were needed to accomplish this mission – but he said he would defer to military leaders on the ground who have asked for fewer troops. He also said that he thought the troops should be send in all at once to be really effective, rather than dispatched in waves over the next few months.
Like Mr. McCain, Mr. Romney was critical of the way this White House has managed the war since the invasion, but he was not quite as harsh as Mr. McCain has been.
“A number of mistakes have been made and those mistakes have contributed to some of the challenges we now face,” he said.
“I’m glad we’re seeing a change in strategy. I’m glad we’re adding to the mission of our military the protection of the safety of citizens in and around Baghdad., I don’t know how you could rebuild a country and an economy if you have your capital city is literally all covered by what we call a red zone. You know you’ve failed if you have a red zone. the conduct of our policy in Iraq has been fraught with a number of mistakes.”Asked if he blamed Mr. Bush or Donald Rumsfeld, the former secretary of defense, Mr. Romney at first said there was no reason to assign blame to anyone.
At first.“Obviously when something goes wrong, the buck stops all the way up the chain,” he said
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