As part of his multimillion-dollar marketing campaign, smooth talking Mitt Romney today rolled out a new ad, entitled "Jihad," that aims to distract from his complete lack of foreign policy credentials and litany of blunders on international affairs. Unfortunately for Romney, all the ad does is expose his superficial knowledge of the threat facing our country and highlight the fact that a Romney presidency would offer four more years of President Bush's failed foreign policy. 

In the ad, Romney completely ignores the number one foreign policy issue in this campaign: the war in Iraq.  Worse, Romney reiterates his misleading rhetoric about "violent, radical Islamic fundamentalism," declaring that "their goal is to unite the world under a single Jihadist caliphate" and "collapse freedom-loving nations like us." But, as critics have pointed out, Romney's ill-informed and dangerously oversimplified outline of the threat is "misleading" and completely ignores the reality on the ground in Iraq and in the Muslim world, including the facts that Shias and Sunnis are "fighting a civil war in Iraq" and many of the groups Romney typically cites "have not targeted the United States." [Boston Globe, 5/27/07; Texas Monthly, 8/07]  Romney's rhetoric may not match reality, but it parallels President Bush's misleading efforts to generate support for his failed Iraq strategy by claiming the war is part of a broader plan to "establish a violent political utopia across the Middle East, which they call caliphate." [Remarks by President Bush, 9/5/06]