Ayoon Wa Azan (a close shave)

A Close Shave is an expression said about a situation where a person escapes something unpleasant or dangerous close to happening. In truth, Mitt Romney’s possibility to win in the U.S. presidential election and his loss was that kind of situation. A Romney victory would have meant the return of the George W. Bush administration to the White House, that is to say, the return of the neoconservatives. Romney would have acted as a Trojan horse for the neocons just like Bush did before him, as one title of an American commentary about the issue put it. During the U.S. election campaign, around one hundred news stories, reports and commentaries about the neocons surrounding Romney were rounded up for me, without me asking for it. After the election, I reviewed the material and kept about 20 topics for any interested reader who may pass by my office. Mitt Romney is an intelligent businessman, and is definitely smarter than George W. Bush, because he cannot possibly be any more stupid. Nevertheless, he is ignorant when it comes to foreign policy, where his only credential seems to be his personal friendship with Benjamin Netanyahu and his support for Israel, often at the expense of American interests. In the statements he made during his election campaign, Romney exposed himself when he said, as I understood from his stances overall, that he wanted “regime change” in Syria and Iran. Yet, it was Bush who first used this phrase and as a result, he lost the war in Iraq between 2003 and 2006 to the national resistance and an overwhelming amount of terrorist attacks. Also, he lost the war in Afghanistan, as well as the War on Terror – all while wrecking the U.S. economy which has yet to recover today. Romney came across as being ignorant in all this when he proclaimed that he wanted a new government in Syria, made up of people who can take responsibility. In an interview with Fox News, Romney said that if he became president, he would prepare for military action against Iran as well. As such, Romney saw the Syrian civil war, which is claiming dozens of lives every day, as an “opportunity”, because he claimed Syria provided Iran with a route to the sea, as he seems to not know that Iran has access to the sea itself. He also believes that the collapse of the Syrian regime would bring about regime change in Iran, and cut arms supplies to Hezbollah. In other words, Romney was repeating the same known policies of the neoconservatives, which have brought America to ruin that it has yet to overcome. Despite this, Romney surrounded himself with neocons, including Dan Senor, the spokesperson for the Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq and author of a book on Israel that Romney quotes from time to time; John Bolton, Bush’s ambassador to the United Nations, which Congress itself had refused to appoint in that post, prompting Bush to appoint him during congressional recess; and Elliott Abrams, whose political scandals begin in Latin America and do not end with his support for the war on Iraq, or with the fact that he still calls for a war on Syria and Iran today. Dov Zakheim, one of Romney’s most senior foreign policy advisers, is a neoconservative hawk and warmonger. However, he had the gall to deny this and said, “One of the favorite canards that Obama activists hurl at Mitt Romney is that he is surrounded by a group of George W. Bush neo-cons who cannot wait to bomb Iran and bring America into yet another Middle Eastern conflict […] None of the staunchest ‘architects and advocates’ of the Iraq war, I repeat, none, is advising Governor Romney.” This is Likudnik chutzpah, because the war criminals whose existence Zakheim denies are in fact all around and also because he was one of the advocates of war in Iraq over falsified premises. Even more, Romney managed to anger his neoconservative advisers as he adopted more moderate stances in the hope of attracting voters. Some neocons even attacked him sharply, while others found excuses for him. Tina Brown, editor of Newsweek and The Daily Beast, said that John Bolton almost threw himself out the window as he heard Romney taking on more moderate views during his third debate with Obama. I wish Bolton did throw himself out of the window, and I wish that this window were on the 38th floor of the UN headquarters in New York, which Bolton once said would not lose anything if it dropped ten of its stories. Now, Bolton wants to put Mahmoud Ahmadinejad on trial before the International Criminal Court (ICC). I agree to this on one condition: That the war criminals in the Israeli government and the neocons like John Bolton go to the ICC first. Barack Obama said that his Republican opponent had ‘Romnesia’, in a play on the word amnesia, and said that Romney was repeating the declared policies of the president to claim he is a moderate. Experts noted that out of 24 foreign policy advisers working for Romney, 17 had worked with George W. Bush. This means that the world would have had to deal with the return of extremist advocates of foreign wars in the service of Israel, or in other words, a disaster that only God knows how and when it could have ended. It was a close shave then. I will continue tomorrow.  -- The views expressed by the author do not necessarily represent or reflect the editorial policy of Arabstoday.