Ron Paul says ignore it; Rick Santorum says bomb it; Mitt Romney says cripple it with sanctions.
Romney, who came in first in both Iowa and New Hampshire, has been mainly critical of the Obama admin-istration’s policies on Iran. “He failed to put in place crippling sanctions. He failed to stand with the dissidents in Iran when they took to the streets. And he’s failed to put in place credible plans, military options to prevent Iran from having a nuclear weapon,“ Romney said.
Fact-checkers have been merciless in pointing out that Obama didn’t publicly back the street demonstrators because the opposition leadership in Iran didn’t want him to do so, but was very critical publicly of the coercive suppression of the demonstrations.
Santorum, who did very poorly in New Hampshire this week, has been the toughest on Iran’s nuclear program. “I would be saying to the Iranians: you either open up those facilities, you begin to dismantle them and make them available to inspectors or we will degrade those facilities through air strikes and make it very public that we are doing that.”
Analysts say that despite those Republicans’ tough rhetoric on Iran, their positions are not much different from current US policy.
“So there’s a lot of pounding the table and identifying the threat. There’s very little discussion about what exactly will be done,” said James Lindsay of the Council on Foreign Relations.
Then there is Ron Paul, who came in third in Iowa: “I think if we overreact and participate in bombing Iran, we’re looking for a lot more trouble.”
Analysts say presidential candidates frequently use foreign policy issues to demonstrate strength by saying they are willing to use America’s military might to accomplish goals overseas.
Gov. Rick Perry of Texas, who did very poorly in both Iowa and New Hampshire, comes at Iran with another concern. Perry said Sunday that he would send US troops back into Iraq. He said Obama’s withdrawal of troops will simply allow Iran to sweep across Iraq “at literally the speed of light.”
Perry said he deplores “the idea that we allow the Iranians to come back into Iraq and take over that country with all the treasure … in blood and money that we’ve spent in Iraq because this president wants to kowtow to his liberal leftist base.”
Some Iranian-Americans say the sharp remarks of Republicans other than Paul are reckless.
“What bellicosity, what saber-rattling gets you is this self-fulfilling prophecy where we are talking about military options, we are talking about war,” said Jamal Abdi, the policy director for the National Iranian American Council.
Abdi hopes American policy on Iran will turn away from tougher sanctions and toward negotiations, a move he concedes is unlikely in an election year.
Paul has garnered a great deal of attention with his anti-war stand, a position usually association with the Democratic Party, not the Republican Party.
Addressing the threat of Iran getting nuclear weapons, Paul said. “The first thing is, the danger is way overblown about them having one in the near future. I think they would like to. I think that would be a concern, and don’t want them to get one, but the IAEA [International Atomic Energy Agency], you know the UN, says they have no evidence that they’re on the verge of a nuclear weapon. Our own CIA says that.”
Paul said, “My greatest fear is that we will overreact, go in, and not have a good reason to go in, like we went into Iraq. Think of all the things that were stirred up about Iraq: nuclear weapons, weapons of mass destruction, Al-Qaeda, and all these things related to 9/11. None of it was true.”
He also pointed to Cold War history for evidence that diplomacy can work. “I felt very fortunate in that October 1962, because [President John] Kennedy at least had the wisdom to call up [Soviet leader Nikita] Khrushchev and talk it, and they both agreed to move their missiles out,” Paul said. “I’m suggesting that more can be achieved without immediately resorting to violence.”
Paul said the history of US-Iran relations provides important lessons about the consequences of foreign intervention.
“They haven’t forgotten 1953. We went into Iran and overthrew their government. Threw out an elected leader. They were practicing democracy, but we didn’t like him because he didn’t want to give the oil benefits to the British and the Americans. He wanted to keep the benefits for the Iranians. So we overthrew him, [Prime Minister Mohammad] Mosaddeq, and put in the Shah, who was there for 26 years and he was a ruthless dictator,” Paul said.
“What does that do? That starts and stimulates radicalism, and that’s how radical Islam got going in Iran until you had the mullahs take over in 1979,” he said. “There’s blowback. The use of force should be the very last thing you do.”
The Texas Congressman expounded on the religious origins of his foreign policy beliefs. “I think there’s nothing wrong with considering the Just War principles that have been around since Saint Augustine [around 400 CE]. You fight war in defense and you do it proportionally. You do it after you talk to people and you do it to protect your own people.
“ They’re universal principles and I just try to follow those because I think the goal is peace. It isn’t occupation,” he said.
