Romney: You Make the Call

The AP recently reported that Mitt Romney didn’t think it was that important to go after Osama bin Laden.  Here’s the quote from the AP article by Liz Sidoti:

[Romney] said the country would be safer by only "a small percentage" and would see "a very insignificant increase in safety" if al-Qaida leader Osama bin Laden was caught because another terrorist would rise to power. "It’s not worth moving heaven and earth spending billions of dollars just trying to catch one person," Romney said. Instead, he said he supports a broader strategy to defeat the Islamic jihad movement.

John McCain and conservative opinion journalists jumped on him.

Good job as usual, MSM, in burying the lede says blogger Dean Barnett.  Romney’s remarks were part of an interview in which, beyond the tactical question of bin Laden, he said the following about the war on terror: 

Global Jihad is not an effort that is being populated by a handful or even a football stadium full of people. It is — it involves millions of people and is going to require a far more comprehensive strategy than a targeted approach for bin laden or a few of his associates.

 So Romney is taking the strategic view, which is that the US and the west are in a long term conflct with the forces of Islamic Jihad.  He judges that this movement does not depend on a single leader, so that decapitation is not worth spending vast amounts of money.

As I watch the Republican presidential contest unfold I confess that I am getting more and more impressed by Romney.  You get the feeling that he has sat down for months with staff and advisers and really thought about the strategic issues to be faced, domestically and in foreign policy.

Either he has thought about the issues or he is doing a superb job of making it look like he has.

How will we tell?  A guy who has done his strategy right will usually have his forces in the right place at the right time.

The classic case of strategy beating tactics was the Franco-Prussian war of 1870.  Many of the battles were inconclusive and many over-eager Prussian commanders made tactical mistakes.  But the Prussian armies were almost always in the right place, and the French armies were almost always in the wrong place.

There’s a reason why we call the activities of politicians prior to an election a “campaign.”