Romney struggles to keep presidential bid on track after latest gaffe on Middle East peace

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Washington, Sept. 19: Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney is fighting to keep his presidential ambitions on track, as further details from a secretly recorded speech revealed him dismissing any prospect of peace in the Middle East.

In the video, Romney described Iran’s leaders as ‘crazy people’ and offered details on how terrorists could bomb Chicago.

According to the Telegraph, the new excerpts came hours after Romney was forced to give a hastily scheduled late-night press conference to explain why, at the same event in Florida, he had dismissed half the US electorate as welfare dependents, concluding ‘My job is not to worry about those people’.

The latest gaffe in the secretly recorded tapes has raised fresh questions over Romney’s already weak foreign policy, the paper said.

It has also completely over-shadowed attempts by him to ‘reset’ his US election campaign this week by focusing on policy specifics, it added.

Asked how he would tackle the quest for Middle East peace if elected Romney had said that he ‘would essentially do nothing’.

“We kick the ball down the field and hope that ultimately, somehow, something will happen and resolve it,” he said.

According to the report, at the same time, Romney showed a startling weak grasp of the intricacies of Middle East geography and politics, by wrongly saying that Syria would border a new Palestinian state, and lumping together all the different Palestinian factions into one, accusing them all of seeking to destroy Israel.

“I look at the Palestinians not wanting to see peace anyway, for political purposes, committed to the destruction and elimination of Israel, and these thorny issues, and I say there’s just no way,” he said. (ANI)