ROMNEY THE IGNORANT. So apparently, Romney's star is rising. That's just swell. My regret from Hardball yesterday is that we ran out of time to talk about 2008, which is what I really wanted to address. It cannot be said often enough, or loudly enough, or forcefully enough, that the Republican Party is uniting around a man who does not know the first thing about the Iraq War. And when I say first thing, I mean that literally. Many of us made fun of Romney's misuse of the terms non sequitur and null set, but the context in which he misused them was far worse. Dodging question about the worth of the Iraq War, he said "if Saddam Hussein had opened his country to IAEA inspectors and they'd gone in and found that there were no weapons of mass destruction, we wouldn't be in this conflict. But he didn't do those things." He did do those things. We pulled the IAEA inspectors out of Iraq to begin bombing. Mohammed el-Baradei, who ran the IAEA inspections, told the UN that "after three months of intrusive inspections, we have, to date, found no evidence of the revival of a nuclear weapons program in Iraq." Romney either doesn't know what happened in the Iraq War, or he is lying about it. Either way, it's inexcusable for a serious presidential candidate to be this misinformed on the preeminent issue of the day. Romney is unfit for the presidency, and the apparent lack of concern among Republicans in the aftermath of these statements show how utterly hollow their professed commitment to the Iraq War is. To win a war, or even survive it, you have to understand it. Empty, ignorant promises of perserverance are not an acceptable substitute. --Ezra Klein
