Brian Beutler uncovers a May 8 transcript which reveals that the debate this week isn't the first time Mitt Romney offered his curious answer to the question "If you had to make the decision, based on what we know now, if you were the president there, do you think you would have done the same thing?"
Well, it's a setting that's almost a null set. Which is, if we knew that Saddam Hussein did not have weapons of mass destruction, and if he had complied with the United Nations resolutions to allow IAEA inspectors into his country, we wouldn't be having this conversation.
Almost a null set, eh? Brian also notes that this is "evidence that he didn't just screw up his Iraq history at the debates on Tuesday, but rather that he's in a constant state of either denial, ignorance, or deception."
On March 7, 2003 Muhammed ElBarradei of the International Atomic Energy Agency told the world, "After three months of intrusive inspections, we have to date found no evidence or plausible indication of the revival of a nuclear weapons programme in Iraq."
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Heads in the Sand
I'm still not sure just what the hell it is that Romney thinks he's saying. I get that he's semi-deflecting the question of "would you have invaded in March 2003 if you had been president" by trying to get across the (part wrong, part dishonest) idea that "if Saddam had only cooperated with the inspectors and proven that he had disarmed, we wouldn't have had to invade, but he didn't cooperate, so we did what we had to do."
But what is "null set" even supposed to mean here? Is he trying to respond to the hypothetical by saying "what we know now is irrelevant to the question of what we should have done in March 2003"? If he's just confused and thinks "null set" means something it doesn't, OK, but I can't even understand what it is that he seems to think it means.
Posted by Haggai | June 7, 2007 10:53 AM