Romney on Iran’s ‘Route to the Sea’

[Geee]

PJMedia:

Why focus on the realities of terror-sponsoring rogue regimes, when you can mock Gov. Mitt Romney instead? After Monday night’s Obama-Romney foreign policy debate, the Washington Post’s Al Kamen is having fun deriding Romney’s description of Syria as Iran’s “route to the sea.” In commentary posted beneath a map of the Middle East, Kamen writes that “the fact-checkers went wild.” He notes, more in derision than in sorrow, that Romney has said this before, and “We had tried ever so hard back in February to get Romney to stop saying that.”

Kamen points out that Iran has direct access to waterways, with its own long coastline along the Persian Gulf and Gulf of Oman, that it doesn’t share a border with Syria, and that Iranians making the overland journey would have to travel through northern Iraq to get to Syria, “and once the Iranians get there, they’ll find Syria has only a measly 111 miles of coastline.”

 

All correct, as far as it goes. Which isn’t very far. To be fair to Kamen, what Romney might more fastidiously have said is that Syria is Iran’s beachhead on the Mediterranean Sea. Which it is. Syria is right up the short coastline from Hezbollah-infested Lebanon, and the state of Israel, which Iran’s regime would like wiped off the map. But Kamen and his fact-checkers-gone-wild have neglected to mention that, or to note Romney’s additional remarks that Syria has been used by Iran as a “route for them to arm Hezbollah in Lebanon, which threatens, of course, our ally, Israel.”