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Romney’s statement illustrates the confusion from Romney’s team on Iran, and indeed on the Romney camp’s wider foreign policy. (Romney’s foreign policy director would neither confirm nor deny that Romney is a neoconservative.) On one hand, the Romney campaign struggles to differentiate its Iran policy from President Obama’s, and on the other, his team sounds more like a neocon revival committee pushing for another war in the Middle East.

The New York Times noticed this contradiction as well, reporting in an article on Friday that a senior foreign policy adviser to Romney said the former Massachusetts governor “would not be content with an Iran one screwdriver’s turn away from a nuclear weapon.” But, the Times added, the adviser “stopped short of saying exactly where, in the development of nuclear capability, Mr. Romney would draw the line.”

President Obama has said that he won’t allow Iran to acquire a nuclear weapon. The Obama administration is aware, not only of the threat an Iranian nuclear weapon poses, but also the potential negative consequences of a military attack on Iran, such as those outlined in a new bipartisan expert report released yesterday. And that, coupled with U.N., U.S. and Israeli assessments that Iran has not yet decided on whether to build a nuclear weapon, leads the administration to pursue a diplomatic solution with Iran, a track the it deems the “best and most permanent way” to solve the nuclear crisis.

http://thinkprogress.org/security/2012/09/14/849521/romney-iran-red-line-obama/

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...Romney's most senior foreign policy advisers, Eliot Cohen and Richard Williamson, said Romney and Obama don't have the same red line with regards to Iran.

Mr. Romney, said Mr. Cohen, "would not be content with an Iran one screwdriver's turn away from a nuclear weapon." Though he did not say exactly where, in the development of nuclear capacity, Mr. Romney would draw his own red line, Mr. Cohen said that it would be far before Mr. Obama's own line -- at the point of actual weaponization -- and that it could be in a different place that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel draws it.

There are 53 days left before the election, and Romney and Romney's advisors are not yet able to say the same thing on one of their key foreign-policy complaints about Obama. One of these days, amateur hour is going to have to end.

http://maddowblog.msnbc.com/_news/2012/09/14/13864799-amateur-hour-continues-this-time-on-iran