IT IS difficult for Republican presidential hopefuls to fault US president Barack Obama on foreign and security policy, because he succeeded where his predecessors failed in eliminating Osama bin Laden and Muammar Gadafy.
One of Mr Obama’s leading challengers, former pizza executive Herman Cain, stumbled badly over foreign policy in an interview that went viral on the internet overnight from Monday night to yesterday morning.
The Milwaukee Journal Sentinelasked Mr Cain if he agreed with the way Mr Obama handled the Libyan crisis. "President Obama supported the uprising, correct?" Mr Cain said, appearing unsure of what had happened. He said he did not agree, then brushed the statement aside, saying "Um, nope, that's a different one." He squirmed and fidgeted. "I gotta go back, see, got all this stuff twirling around in my head."
Mr Cain eventually said the Obama administration should have assessed better who the Libyan opposition were.
But the interlude strengthened disquiet over the fact that some Republican candidates wear their ignorance like a badge of honour. Mr Cain’s earlier statement that he did not need to know who the president of “Uz-beki-beki-beki-beki-stan-stan” was led to comparisons with the Know Nothing party of the 1850s.
In the first foreign policy debate of the campaign on November 12th, Republican hopefuls attacked Mr Obama for failing to stop Iran’s nuclear weapons programme, for signalling withdrawal dates in Afghanistan and for letting China “run all over us”, in the words of former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney.
Divisions among the eight candidates on all these issues strengthened the impression of disarray on the right. A number of important questions did not even surface. Europe was not mentioned once. Nor were the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the Arab Spring.
Mr Romney called Iran’s continuing nuclear programme Mr Obama’s “greatest failing”. He condemned the president for not speaking out during the Iranian green movement protests in 2009 – a move that could have backfired, given the US’s unhappy history of intervention in Iran.
“Look, one thing you can know is that if we re-elect Barack Obama, Iran will have a nuclear weapon,” Mr Romney said. “And if you elect me as the next president, they will not have a nuclear weapon.”
But Mr Romney and other candidates proposed virtually the same policies followed by the Bush and Obama administrations against Iran: economic sanctions, covert operations, working with Israel and Persian Gulf states, and military action as a last resort.
“If, after all of the work we’ve done, there’s nothing else we could do besides take military action, then of course you take military action,” Mr Romney said.
Former senator Rick Santorum suggested: “We should be working with Israel right now to do what they did in Syria [in 2007], what they did in Iraq [in 1981], which is take out that nuclear capability before the next explosion we hear in Iran is a nuclear one.”
Representative Michele Bachmann claimed “the table is being set for worldwide nuclear war against Israel”. Mr Obama “has been more than willing to stand with Occupy Wall Street, but he hasn’t been willing to stand with Israel”, she said.
Texas governor Rick Perry said the US should “shut down [Iran’s] economy” by imposing sanctions on Iran’s central bank, a step rejected until now because of the hardship it would impose.
Iran is the second-largest oil producer in the Organisation of the Petroleum Exporting Countries after Saudi Arabia, and sanctions against the Iranian central bank would amount to an embargo on Iranian oil, driving up the price of petroleum throughout the world.
Former US secretary of state Colin Powell told ABC News that Republican talk of a military strike against Iran “seems to me just raises the temperature and makes it that much more difficult to try to find a solution to the problem”.
Writing in Foreign Policymagazine, Middle East expert Aaron David Miller said bombing Iranian nuclear sites would be like "mowing the grass" because, "unless a strike succeeded in permanently crippling the Iranian capacity to produce and weaponise fissile material, the grass would only grow back again. And no strike – or even series of strikes – can accomplish this."
Representative Ron Paul of Texas often disagrees with his fellow Republican candidates.
“What’s going on right now [with respect to Iran] is similar to the war propaganda that went on against Iraq,” he said. “And you know they didn’t have weapons of mass destruction and it was orchestrated and it was, to me, a tragedy of what’s happened these last 10 years . . . So no, it’s not worthwhile going to war.”
Mr Paul and former Utah governor Jon Huntsman condemned waterboarding – simulated drowning – as torture. But Mr Cain and Ms Bachmann called for it to be reinstated as an interrogation technique. “I would return to that policy. I don’t see it as torture,” Mr Cain said.
“I think [waterboarding] was very effective,” Ms Bachmann said. “Barack Obama . . . is allowing the ACLU [American Civil Liberties Union] to run the CIA . . . It is as though we have decided we want to lose in the war of terror under President Obama.”
