Tuesday, May 29, 2012

What's Behind Romney's Extremist Foreign Policy?

One would think that after the disastrous fool's errand in Iraq launched needlessly by Chimperator George Bush and the never ending fiasco in Afghanistan which any two-bit historian could have predicted, the GOP and Mitt Romney would be preaching a moderate foreign policy that seeks to avoid future disasters. But quite to the contrary, Mitt Romney seems hell bent to venture into a shooting war with Iran and a trade war with China.  One has to wonder why the extremism.  One obvious answer is the xenophobia of the delusional Kool-Aid drinking base that Romney is constantly pandering to.  Another answer, based on a post by Andrew Sullivan, might be on the bizarre manner in which Romney's Mormon faith depicts the United States as the sole blessed by God nation on earth.  The latter explanation is far more frightening than the first.  Here are highlights from Andrew's post:

In some ways, Mormonism is the perfect form of Christianity for Christianist nationalist politics. It is the only form of Christianity that believes Jesus visited America; that the Garden of Eden was somewhere in Missouri; and the only one that, as a theological proposition, sees the US Constitution as an integral part of the divine order, and one that Jesus personally foresaw in his appearances in America two millennia ago, and blessed.

It means that America alone has divine permission to do what it wants in the wider world, that America is subject to different standards than everyone else (because we alone are divinely blessed), and that geopolitics is about the global supremacy of the modern world's first divine nation (even if Iran and Israel might differ on which country is divinely blessed).

There's a reason, in other words, that Romney's foreign policy does not have a moderate, realist strain to it; that it is wedded to zero-sum conflict as the only way to engage the world (he regards Russia as America's number one geopolitical foe and wants a trade war with China); that its opposition to Jihadism gets perilously close to opposition to Islam as a whole; and that its core principle is that America is always, by definition, right.

I wish we had a Mormon candidate in a party that adheres to a separation of church and state and of politics and religion (like Reid or Huntsman in a different universe). Then we could regard that faith as utterly irrelevant to a candidate's capacity for running the country. But when the GOP affirmatively declares that there is no such thing as a secular decision, that there is no place and no decision and no policy which is not subject to religious and theological influence ... it seems to me that we have to examine how a candidate's faith affects their politics - by the GOP's own reasoning.

Does Romney believe that America is uniquely divine among nations? How would that affect his decisions as president? Does he believe that the Constitution is also divine and a "necessary prologue" for the triumph of the LDS Church in America and across the world? Would he therefore appoint Justices who share that view? Or if the original Constitution is divine, and the Amendments are not, as Garry Wills asks, what status do the Amendments have in a Mormon president's eyes?
Do I find these possibilities about Romney very, very frightening?  Most certainly.  Particularly given the heightened powers of the presidency pushed through by the Chimperator and Emperor Palpatine Cheney.  I am not anti-religion per se.  However, religion has caused more wars and more needless deaths than almost any other cause throughout history.  If Romney believes even a fraction of this bullshit, the last thing we need is for him to be in the White House.

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