The GOP nominee says his Middle East policy would be about more than just killing bad guys. The trick isn't setting the goals, it's achieving them.





President Obama charged Monday night that his opponent's Middle East strategy has been inconsistent and inadequate. How did Mitt Romney respond? With one of his stranger monologues. "Well, my strategy's pretty straightforward, which is to go after the bad guys, to make sure we do our very best to interrupt them, to kill them, to take them out of the picture," he began. That made sense. He'll continue policies like drone strikes and covert special-forces raids.

"But my strategy is broader than that," Romney continued. "The key that we're going to have to pursue is a pathway to get the Muslim world to be able to reject extremism on its own. We don't want another Iraq. We don't want another Afghanistan. That's not the right course for us. The right course for us is to make sure that we go after the people who are leaders of these various anti-American groups and these -- these jihadists, but also help the Muslim world. And how we do that? A group of Arab scholars came together, organized by the U.N., to look at how we can help the -- the world reject these -- these terrorists. And the answer they came up was this."