If Mitt Were President

At home, our economy is still not as strong as it could be, long-term growth is in doubt, wages are stagnant, and around the world there’s deep concern that as America’s leadership has unraveled, hostile forces have filled the vacuum. Mitt Romney was right on these issues in the last campaign, and they form the core of another campaign for president. I think if Romney were president there wouldn’t be an ISIS at all, Putin would know his place in life, and domestically, things would be in better shape ('Mitt Romney crafting a rationale for 2016 run').

Since gaining power in Syria, Islamic State has moved into Iraq where it has seized control of several cities. Romney argued Obama failed to take advantage of an opportunity to stop the group before it established itself in Iraq. "Almost a year ago, American intelligence sources told the president that there was a group forming called ISIS ... and that there was a significant chance that they would go into Iraq and invade a city there. The president failed to take action. He watched," Romney said. "We saw ISIS roll into Iraq and, instead of attacking them immediately and knocking them in their convoy when they would have been easy to knock down, relatively easy to knock down, the president again watched. And now we're in a position where ISIS has run throughout major portions of Iraq. There have been horrific human rights abuses, tragedies."

We have failed to prevent the Islamist terrorists ISIS from gaining power in both Syria and Iraq, and now America is in a very difficult position with respect to Islamic State."In my view, it is unacceptable for Americans and for the world to see the establishment of a major territory ... that is controlled by radical, violent jihadists from which they would clearly launch attacks against our friends and allies throughout the world, but also against us," said Romney. "So, we must take action, including the air strikes that you're seeing as necessary to prevent ISIS from becoming a major geographic and economic player." Perhaps we will even be forced to take the step of sending young Americans out there to bring peace. This affects us all. We have seen how our enemies in the mainstream media even place the blame on antiquity collectors, accusing them of financing the ISIS war chest.

Yet this could all have been avoided. "Mistakes were made and now we have ISIS," Romney said. The  Islamic State would not have gained ground if America had adopted Romney's 2012 plan for dealing with the revolution against Syrian President Bashar Assad. "If you go back a few years when Syria fell into revolution and tumult, when rebels were pushing against Assad, I laid out what I thought was a prudent course for us to see stability in Syria," said Romney. "Had we followed that course, there's a good chance you would not see an ISIS today." He had postulated not only backing and arming the moderate revolutionaries in Syria, but also assuring Assad's tribe (the Alawites), that they would have a future in the country without the current regime. "These kind of actions would have stabilized Syria, at least I believe so, and would have prevented the growth of a group like ISIS," explained Romney.

We should have maintained our presence in Iraq, but President didn't do it. If we'd armed the moderates in Syria before all this began, they could have been able to keep something like ISIS from being formed. And as a result of the mistakes that have been made in the past on the President's part, we now have terrible visions being shown on TV and the threat to ourselves here in the homeland. We have to be open to whatever it takes to destroy ISIS. It is not acceptable for ISIS to represent the kind of threat it does to the peace of the world and to our interests as Americans.