The Wayne Dumond story has the Huckabee campaign in serious damage control mode. Still, this is a 10 year-old story that the Governor managed to overcome in Arkansas in two elections. I’m far more interested in the fallout of Huckabee’s utter ignorance, not only on the Iran NIE, but on foreign policy altogether. The less-remarked-upon part of the deer in the headlights meeting with reporters was where he decides to just answer by saying something some dude on the street told him.
I don’t know where the intelligence is coming from that says they have suspended the program or how credible that is versus the view that they actually are expanding it. … And I’ve heard, the last two weeks, supposed reports that they are accelerating it and it could be having a reactor in a much shorter period of time than originally been thought.
As Juan Cole notes, this suggests that Huckabee doesn’t know what a National Intelligence Estimate is. Also, he thinks the problem is Iran having a “reactor,” when that would be for civilian energy purposes, which is not only fully legal under the Nonproliferation Treaty to which Iran is a signatory, but is the kind of nuclear power that is in Huckabee’s own energy plan.
Sarah Posner adds:
His shoestring campaign, to my knowledge, doesn’t have any foreign policy advisers, and Huckabee is more interested in reaching out to apocalyptic end-timers like Kenneth Copeland and Tim LaHaye, for whom the only sound Middle East policy is found in the Book of Revelation, or encrypted in various parts of the Old Testament, which many end-timers believe foretell Christ’s birth, death, resurrection, and return.
We’re coming up on eight years of someone who doesn’t know a thing about foreign policy. Do we really need another four?
2 Responses to “Huckabee’s Troubling Ignorance”
I agree Huckabee’s comment suggested more craziness that complete ignorance. Saying “I don’t know where this intelligence is coming from” and wondering how “credible” it is versus the alternate view is the language of Cheney-Bolton, who hold that the intelligence community is always just pushing some narrow agenda and you always have to look at the other side. To me he displays more than enough foreign policy competence to point to at least a couple of middle eastern countries on a map and say: “Invade those ones.” Hopefully he won’t panic when he finds out Canada has reactors not far from the US border. I can see that really upsetting him.
Something to say?
I’ve seen a video where Huckabee refers to a NIE report, so I’m sure he actually knows about NIE
Left by Jake
December 6, 2007 at 4:45pm