Mike Huckabee: the Foreign Policy Candidate
Ed Kenney
Afghanistan Study Group Blogger
With all the hullabaloo around yesterday’s bombshell Rolling Stone piece about the U.S. Military using psy-ops on sitting members of Congress and their own Chair of the Joint Chiefs, one key story has gone relatively unnoticed. I’ll start by saying that Mike Huckabee has taken some pretty far-out positions on foreign policy. In 2009, he famously said that there is no room in the middle of the Jewish homeland for a Palestinian state. Early this year, he elaborated on this point by suggesting that the Palestinians repatriate to Muslim lands.
But give the Huck some credit. He is the second potential GOP presidential candidate after Ron Paul to express doubt about the war in Afghanistan. At a session with journalists sponsored by the Christian Science Monitor, Huckabee reportedly asked whether there was a viable exit strategy.
From the Washington Post:
“What’s the endgame we’re playing here?” [Huckabee] told reporters at a session hosted by the Christian Science Monitor. “I can’t see a conclusion.”
This is an important question. If our goal is a “Valhalla in Afghanistan”, the U.S. will never complete this mission. If the goal is to protect the U.S.’s vital national interests, a change strategy can achieve this objective at considerably less cost in both blood and treasure. Hopefully, Huckabee’s openness to ask these hard questions will encourage a real debate in the Republican presidential primary about the wisdom of our strategy in Afghanistan. It’s perhaps the best opportunity yet to educate the American people about what’s actually going right and wrong, and to debate what the best course for American national security is going forward.
Kudos to Huckabee.
