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QUESTION: If Israel attacked Iran to prevent Tehran from getting nuclear weapons, would you help Israel launch the attack or support it otherwise?
HERMAN CAIN: I would first make sure that they had a credible plan for success, clarity of mission and clarity of success. Remember, when you talk about attacking Iran, it is a very mountainous region. The latest reports say that there may be 40 different locations [for nuclear work], and I would want to make sure that we had a good idea from intelligence sources where these are located. And if Israel had a credible plan that it appeared as if they could succeed, I would support Israel, yes. And in some instances, depending upon how strong the plan is, we would join with Israel for that, if it was clear what the mission was and it was clear what the definition of victory was.
QUESTION: Congressman Paul, would you support Israel and help Israel in such an attack?
RON PAUL: No, I wouldn’t do that. But there would be good reasons because I don’t expect it to happen. Because, you know, the Mossad leader that just retired said it [bombing Israel] would be the stupidest thing to do in the world. And it’s a big argument over in Israel. They’re not about to do this. They’ve just polled 40 major experts on foreign policy here by the National Journal. Not one of them said there should be a unilateral attack on the sites in Iran. So that’s not going to happen. And if it did, why does Israel need our help? We need to get out of their way. I mean, we interfere with them [Israel]. We interfere with them when they deal with their borders, when they want to have peace treaties. We tell them what they can do because we buy their allegiance and they sacrifice their sovereignty to us. And then they decide they want to bomb something, that’s their business. But they should, you know, suffer the consequences. When they bombed the Iraqi nuclear site, back in the ’80s, I was one of the few in Congress that said it’s none of our business and Israel should take care of themselves. Israel has 200, 300 nuclear missiles. And they can take care of themselves. We don’t even have a treaty with Israel. Why do we have this automatic commitment that we’re going to send our kids and send our money endlessly to [defend] Israel? So I think they’re quite capable of taking care of themselves. Just think of all the money we gave to Egypt over 30 or 40 years. Now, look, we were buying friendship. Now there’s a civil war. They’re less friendly to Israel. The whole thing is going to backfire once we go bankrupt and we remove our troops, so I think we should be very cautious in our willingness to go to war and send troops without a proper declaration by the US Congress.
QUESTION: Let me let Herman Cain respond.
CAIN: Thank you. I stated if the mission and the plan were clear that it could succeed, but I pointed out that that is highly unlikely, given the terrain, the mountainous terrain in Iran. But here’s the other reason that we should help Israel in an initiative like that. [Look] to Afghanistan: if we pull out of Afghanistan too soon, Iran is going to help to fulfill that power vacuum in Afghanistan. And so it is in our best interests, the United States of America, to prevent them from being able to help fill that power vacuum in Afghanistan.
QUESTION: Yesterday the United States and the UK slapped new sanctions on Iran. But we haven’t bought oil directly from Iran in over 30 years. We’ve had targeted sanctions on Iran for more than half that time. Nonetheless, Iran is probably less than a year away from getting a nuclear weapon. Do you believe that there is any set of sanctions that could be put in place that would stop Iran from getting a nuclear weapon? Let’s go to Governor Perry. What do you think?
PERRY: Absolutely. We need to sanction the Iranian Central Bank. That would be one of the most powerful ways to impact that. As a matter of fact, Congressman Paul, that is what we need to do before we ever start having any conversations about a military strike, [we need] to use every sanction that we have. And when you sanction the Iranian Central Bank, that will shut down that economy. At that particular point in time, they truly have to deal with the United States. There is an area over there [with] all of them working together, and I’m talking about Syria and bringing them into the mix as well. One of the options is to have a no-fly zone over Syria at the same time you’re putting those types of sanctions against Iran. And in that moment, they will understand that America is serious. This President refuses to do that, and it’s another show of lack of leadership from the President of the United States.
QUESTION: The argument, Speaker Gingrich—and I know you’ve studied this, and I want you to weigh in—on the sanctioning of the Iranian Central Bank, because if you do that, for all practical purposes, it cuts off Iranian oil exports, 4 million barrels a day. The Europeans get a lot of that oil. They think their economy, if the price of gasoline skyrocketed, which it would, would be disastrous. That’s why the pressure is on the US to not impose those sanctions. What say you?
NEWT GINGRICH: The question you just asked is perfect, because the fact is we ought to have a massive all-sources energy program in the United States designed to, once again, create a surplus of energy here, so we could say to the Europeans pretty cheerfully, that [given] all the various sources of oil we have in the United States, we could literally replace the Iranian oil. Now that’s how we won World War II. We all get sucked into these tactical discussions. We need a strategy of defeating and replacing the current Iranian regime with minimum use of force. We need a strategy, as Rick Santorum was saying, of being honest about radical Islam and designing a strategy to defeat it wherever it happens to exist. We need a strategy in Central Asia that recognizes that, frankly, if you’re Pashtun, you don’t care whether you’re in Pakistan or Afghanistan, because you have the same tribal relationships. So we need to be much more strategic and less tactical in our discussion. But if we were serious, we could break the Iranian regime, I think, within a year, starting candidly with cutting off the gasoline supply to Iran, and then, frankly, sabotaging the only refinery they have.
QUESTION: But sanctions on the Iranian Central Bank now, is that a good idea or a bad idea?
GINGRICH: I think it’s a good idea if you’re serious about stopping them. I think replacing the regime before they get a nuclear weapon without a war beats replacing the regime with war, which beats allowing them to have a nuclear weapon. Those are your three choices.
QUESTION: I want Congresswoman Bachmann to weigh in. Go ahead.
MICHELE BACHMANN: I agree with all of that. And energy independence is something that President Obama certainly has avoided.
QUESTION: But that’s going to take many years.
BACHMANN: It will. But almost every decision that the president has made since he came in has been one to put the United States in a position of unilateral disarmament including the most recent decision he made to cancel the Keystone Pipeline. That would have not only created jobs but it would have helped us in energy independence. But I want to go back to something. Why is it that we’re talking about Israel having to make a strike against Iran? It’s because Iran has announced they plan to strike Israel. They’ve stated, as recently as August just before President Ahmadi-nejad came to the UN General Assembly. He said that he wanted to eradicate Israel from the face of the earth. He has said that if he has a nuclear weapon he will use it to wipe Israel off the face of the earth. He will use it against the United States of America. This isn’t just an idle threat. This is a reality. And that’s why President Obama has failed the American people because, for two and a half years, he gave Iran the luxury of time. He met with them with no preconditions. It’s the doctrine of appeasement. He has changed the course of history because at the time when we needed a leader most, we didn’t have one. That’s what I’ll do differently as President of the United States. I’ll lead.
QUESTION: I’m going to bring Governor Huntsman in, but very quickly, Mr. Speaker, would you, if you were president of the United States, bomb Iran’s nuclear facilities to prevent it from becoming a nuclear power?
GINGRICH: Only as a last recourse and only as a step towards replacing the regime. No bombing campaign, which leaves the regime in charge, is going to accomplish very much in the long run. You have to seriously talk about regime replacement, not just attacking them. But I will also say—this is, I guess, where I disagree with my good friend Ron Paul—if my choice was to collaborate with the Israelis on a conventional campaign or force them [Israel] to use their nuclear weapons, it will be an extraordinarily dangerous world if out of a sense of being abandoned they went nuclear and used multiple nuclear weapons in Iran. That would be a future none of us would want to live through.
JON HUNTSMAN: History will tell. We missed the Persian spring. The president failed on that front. We go into Libya, where, to my mind, we don’t have any definable American interests. We’ve got Syria now on the horizon, where we do have American interests. It’s called Israel. They’re a friend and ally. And we need to remind the world what it means to be a friend and ally of the United States. And we have nuclearization in Iran. Centrifuges spinning. At some point, they’re going to have enough in the way of fissile material out of which to make a weapon. That’s a certainty. We had a discussion earlier tonight about sanctions. Everybody commented on sanctions. Sanctions aren’t going to work, I hate to break it to you. They’re not going to work because the Chinese aren’t going to play ball and the Russians aren’t going to play ball. And I believe the mullahs have already decided they want to go nuclear. Why? They have looked at North Korea. They’ve got a weapon. Nobody touches them. They look at Libya. Libya gave up their weapon in exchange for friendship with the world. Look where they are.
QUESTION: We’re ready to wrap it up. But let me have Governor Perry react.
RICK PERRY: Yes, as I said, the no-fly zone [over Syria] is one of the options that we have. This is not just about Syria. This is about Iran and those two, as a partnership exporting terrorism around the world. And if we’re going to be serious about saving Israel, we better get serious about Syria and Iran, and we better get serious right now.
[Later in the debate there was a mention by former Senator Santorum of a need to profile suspects to pinpoint terrorists in the United States.]
QUESTION: So, just to be precise, is it ethnic profiling, religious profiling? Who would be profiled?
RICK SANTORUM: Obviously, Muslims would be someone you’d look at, absolutely. The radical Muslims are the people that are committing these crimes, by and large, as well as younger males. I mean, these are things that—not exclusively—but these are things that you profile to find the most likely candidate.
QUESTION: Congressman Paul?
PAUL: That’s digging a digging a hole for ourselves. What if they look like Timothy McVeigh [the Oklahoma City truck bomber who killed 168 people in 1995]? You know, he was a pretty tough criminal. I think we’re using too much carelessness in the use of words that we’re at war. I don’t remember voting on a declaration of war. Oh, we’re against terrorism. [But] terrorism is a tactic. It isn’t a person. It isn’t a people. So this is a very careless use of words. What about this? Sacrifice liberties because there are terrorists? You’re the judge and the jury? No, they’re suspects.