Former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney told a Republican Jewish Coalition (RJC) audience last week that “nothing focuses [Iranian] minds more than suffering from sanctions and seeing a military option.” But yesterday, in a Fox News interview, Romney made clear that if president, he would have employed that military option when the U.S. spy drone crashed in Iran and even suggested he’d order Americans into Iran to retrieve it:

ROMNEY: Absolutely take it out. He was extraordinarily weak and timid in a critical moment. This will have severe implications for us, long term. And it was a terrible mistake on his part. I find it incomprehensible that he didn’t destroy it or go get it. I think destroying it would have been a good deal easier. Destroy it immediately or go get it. But the idea of letting it fall into the hands of people who will use it against us, use the intelligence capacity against us is an enormous mistake on the part of the president.

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Romney isn’t alone in his calls for an airstrike to destroy the drone. Earlier this week, former Vice President Dick Cheney said the “right response” would have been to order a “quick airstrike” to destroy the drone.

But Romney is the first GOP voice to actually endorse an incursion into Iran to retrieve the drone. Romney glosses over the potential repercussions of a U.S. airstrike or raid on Iranian territory. Furthermore, the George W. Bush administration, with Cheney as Vice President, faced an even more confrontational situation when, on April 1, 2001, a mid-air collision between a Chinese fighter jet and a U.S. Navy intelligence aircraft forced the U.S. plane to make an emergency landing on China’s Hainan Island. The Bush administration resolved the crisis by issuing an apology.

Both Romney and Cheney are eager to criticize the White House for any perceived concessions to Iran but neither have criticized the Bush administration for its handling of a similar incident or acknowledged that a “quick airstrike” or committing military force to “go get it” could be seen as dangerously provocative policy decisions.

Yesterday during his press conference with Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki, President Obama said the administration has asked the Iranians to return the surveillance drone that was downed in Iranian territory last week. “We have asked for it back — we’ll see how the Iranians respond,” Obama said. However the chances that Iran will respond positively to that request appear dim, as Iran’s Defense Minister said today, “Instead of apologizing to the Iranian nation, [the U.S.] is brazenly asking for the drone back.”

Talking with CNN’s Erin Burnett last night, Vice President Cheney offered what he said would’ve been the “right response” — to bomb Iran:

CHENEY: The right response to that would have been to go in immediately after it had gone down and destroy it. You can do that from the air. You can do that with a quick airstrike, and in effect make it impossible for them to benefit from having captured that drone. I was told that the president had three options on his desk. He rejected all of them. [...]

They all involved sending somebody in to try to recover it, or if you can’t do that, admittedly that would be a difficult operation, you certainly could have gone in and destroyed it on the ground with an airstrike. But he didn’t take any of the options. He asked for them to return it. And they aren’t going to do that.

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Just a “quick airstrike,” Cheney said was all it would take. Nothing fancy. Of course this particularly direction doesn’t take into account how the Iranians might perceive and react to an American bombing campaign on their soil.

It’s also worth noting that early on during the Bush administration — when Cheney was arguably running the foreign policy show — President Bush pursued a similar course that Obama chose with the drone when an American spy-plane collided with a Chinese fighter jet and was forced to land on Chinese territory. Instead of bombing the plane, the United States issued a letter of apology saying it was “very sorry.” The Chinese released the American flight crew and returned the plane in pieces three months later.

Today former Massachusetts governor and current Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney announced his campaign’s foreign policy team. Many of the names are drawn from the foreign policy establishment and prominent Republican-associated security circles. “Their remarkable experience, wisdom, and depth of knowledge will be critical to ensuring that the 21st century is another American Century,” Romney said in a statement. Notably, several of Romney’s advisers were among the most forceful proponents a “new American Century” already, one that involved primarily pushing for war in Iraq.

ELIOT COHEN

Cohen, who was a member of the short-lived Committee for the Liberation of Iraq that agitated for an invasion in 2002 and early 2003 and now directs the Johns Hopkins international affairs school, stuck to the theme that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction right up until the eve of the U.S. invasion. Though he eventually walked-back his support for the war, in February 2003, Cohn told NBC Nightly News:

I would suspect that if there’re going to be heavy civilian casualties, they’ll mainly be caused by the Iraqis and would flow from the use of chemical weapons or biological weapons.

ROBERT KAGAN

Kagan, a founder of the Project For A New American Century (PNAC) and the Foreign Policy Initiative (FPI), argued for the military overthrow of Saddam Hussein beginning in the mid 1990s. In late 1998, after President Bill Clinton launched airstrikes against Iraq, Kagan complained on NPR that the attack didn’t go far enough and that Hussein needed to be overthrown:

I would agree that firing even several hundred cruise missiles into Iraq cannot be the end of the story. You really do have to go to the heart of the problem. The heart of the problem is Saddam Hussein himself, and any strategy the administration undertakes has to have a practical goal of removing Saddam Hussein from power.

PNAC, one of the groups Kagan founded (along with neoconservative don Bill Kristol), made statements and wrote a series of open letters to Presidents Clinton and George W. Bush from 1998 to 2003 that referred to Iraq, often calling for the military overthrow of Saddam Hussein and accusing him both of possessing weapons of mass destruction and having ties to Al Qaeda. Among the signatories to the letters were a bevy of those listed today as Romney advisers, including Kagan himself, Cohen, Paula Dobriansky, Vin Weber, John Lehman (a National Security Advisory Council member of the Islamophobic Center for Security Policy), now-super-lobbyist Vin Weber.

After the invasion, Iraq fell under the control of L. Paul Bremer, the U.S. viceroy in charge of the Coalition Provisional Authority that is widely blamed for botching the early days of the occupation. Two of Bremer’s top advisers — Meghan O’Sullivan, who later served as a Deputy National Security Advisor for Iraq and Afghanistan in the Bush administration and is now a Harvard professor, and CPA spokesperson Dan Senor, now with the neoconservative Foreign Policy Initiative (think PNAC 2.0, formed in 2009 by Senor, Kagan and Kristol) — are now with Romney’s team.

Former Vice President Dick Cheney lauded President Obama for his significant success in his counterterrorism efforts and even admitted Obama secured more successes than the Bush administration. However, still smarting from Obama’s rebuke of torture or “enhanced interrogation techniques” in 2009, Cheney and his daughter Liz Cheney asked that Obama apologize to the Bush administration after wrongly insisting he benefited from such techniques.

Today on CNN, Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) once again slammed the use of “enhanced interrogation techniques,” stating, “It’s very obvious one of the great recruitment tools that our enemies has is the fact that we tortured people which is not in keeping with the standards of the treatment of prisoners.” In direct rebuttal of Liz Cheney, he added, “We never got useful information as a result of torture but we sure got a lot of angry citizens around the world.”

When asked whether Obama owes the Bush administration an apology over his rebuke of torture techniques, McCain coyly responded, “About what?” Noting resounding opposition in the Senate to torture and the United Nations Geneva Convention’s prohibition of such treatment, he dismissed the idea that the Bush administration deserves any apology after having used those methods:

MCCAIN: The vote was 90 to 6 in the United States Senate to prohibit cruel and inhumane mistreatment — this amendment, a piece of legislation that I was a sponsor of. The Senate has spoken, the American people have spoken, people of the world have spoken. Torturing people in violation of international agreements such as the Geneva Conventions is prohibited and frankly very harmful to the image of the United States of America.

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This week, the Obama administration delivered another significant blow to al Qaeda by successfully killing terror propagandist Anwar al-Awlaki. AS MSNBC notes, “No president since George H.W. Bush has had more foreign-policy successes happen under his watch than President Obama.” Today on CNN’s State of the Union, Vice President Dick Cheney firmly agreed with host Candy Crowley that Obama has waged a successful war on terror and that he has secured more successes than the Bush administration. But Cheney slammed Obama for failing to call his anti-terror efforts “what it is,” a “war on terror.”

Citing Obama’s Cairo speech in 2009 in which he criticized the Bush administration for “overreacting to the events of 9/11″ and called for a ban on torture when “we [the Bush Administration] were never torturing anyone in the first place,” Cheney said he felt that Obama owes the Bush administration an apology. Insisting that enhanced interrogation techniques helped identify the location of Osama bin Laden, his daughter Liz Cheney added that “he slandered the nation” in Cairo and “he owes an apology to the American people”:

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For the record, the Bush administration actually admitted to using torture techniques in 2008 and, as Bush’s Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld noted, those techniques did not lead to the location of Osama bin Laden.

Today, Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas formally asked that Palestine become a full member of the United Nations despite staunch opposition from Israel and the U.S. On cue, Republicans are attacking the U.N. for even considering such a request. Joining House Foreign Affairs Committee Chairwoman Ileana Ros-Lehtinen (R-FL), Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-UT) reissued his call to pass his bill — the Solidarity with Israel Act — which would eliminate U.S. Funding for the U.N. if the Security Council or the General Assembly changes Palestine’s current status, and thus “votes to harm our trusted ally,” he said.

But in a somewhat surprising turn, former Vice President Dick Cheney dismissed such measures. When Pajamas Media asked whether he agreed that defunding the U.N. was warranted in light of the Palestinian Authority’s effort, Cheney said “I don’t think that’s necessarily the right response”:

CHENEY: I’ve never been a great fan of the United Nations over the years…I’ve felt that they didn’t exercise they’re authority they way they might. But in terms of the basic notion that we are going to defund the U.N., I haven’t given it any thought. People get severely agitated about what’s going on at the United Nations, they used to up in Congress….There are a lot of Americans who look askance at the United Nations and probably would in a heart beat vote for defunding. I don’t think that’s necessarily the right response here. We’ll see what happens.

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There’s good reason to question the move. As Center for American Progress’s Sarah Margon notes, such bills set “a dramatic precedent that far exceeds previous anti-U.N. initiatives.” Not only would it force the U.N. to adopt a voluntary budget model, it would “end funding for Palestinian refugees, restrict the use of U.S. funds to the goals outlined by Congress, and stop U.S. contributions to U.N. peacekeeping operations” until reforms are made.

What’s more, these measures ignore the U.N’s recent successes in “galvanizing international action” that aligns with U.S. interests — be it in Libya, Syria, or Iran. Along with providing a more cost effective way to face and coordinate on global challenges, Margonn also notes that U.N. participation “enhance[s] our ability to promote our agenda by leveraging key actors.”

Nonetheless, right-wing conservatives seem wedded to their dogmatic campaign against the U.N. As GOP presidential candidate Newt Gingrich summed up last night, any U.N. action that may work against U.S. interests sparks their question, “Why are you giving them anything?”