Romney 2007: Track Bin Laden Anywhere, Kill Him

While President Obama has been exploiting the killing of Osama Bin Laden for his re-election campaign, cutting ads that suggest that Mitt Romney wouldn’t have pulled the trigger on the operation to get Bin Laden, the evidence shows otherwise. As the video below shows, Romney stated that Bin Laden should be tracked anywhere and killed, in clear and convincing language at a GOP debate broadcast on MSNBC in May 2007:

ROMNEY: Of course we get Osama Bin Laden and track him wherever he has to go and make sure he pays for the outrage he exacted upon America.

MATTHEWS: Do we move heaven and earth to get him?

ROMNEY: We move everything to get him. But I don’t want to buy into the Democratic pitch that this is all about one person, Osama Bin Laden, because after we get him, there’s gonna be another and another. This is about Shia and Sunni. This is about Hezbollah and Hamas and Al Qaeda and the Muslim Brotherhood. This is a worldwide jihadist effort to try to cause the collapse of all moderate Islamic governments and replace them with a caliphate. They ultimately want to bring down the United States of America. This is a global effort we’re going to have to lead to overcome this jihadist effort. It’s more than Osama Bin Laden, but he is gonna pay, and he will die.

So much for Obama’s pathetic claim that Romney wouldn’t have gone after Bin Laden. This is how desperate the Obama campaign has become – even the Los Angeles Times, a reliable Obama ally, called the ad “pretty despicable,” and so did Arianna Huffington.

Romney’s words now look prophetic. His statements that moderate governments in the Middle East – like, say the government of Egypt – would be toppled and replaced with Islamic governments were precisely correct. And Romney was right to warn that Bin Laden’s death wouldn’t mean the end of the war on terror, even if the Obama administration insists that it should.

It is Romney who is tough on the war on terror. It is Obama who is pusillanimous. And one right call can’t make up for that baseline level of spine in the Obama foreign policy, or the massive dishonesty exhibited by Obama’s campaign.