Rick Santorum has officially announced his candidacy for President. Santorum is about as hawkish as the Republican field is going to get for 2012. And that’s saying a lot. He is most well known for being a culture warrior, but according to him, his expertise lies elsewhere:
“I have one major piece of legislation I passed, on partial-birth abortion, but I had two on foreign policy — the Syria Accountability Act and the Iran Freedom and Support Act, both of which were opposed by Bush and took me a year or more,” he said. He added: “I spent the last four years at the Ethics and Public Policy Center giving lectures all over the country on radical jihadism and the ‘Gathering Storm of the 21st Century.’ I haven’t done squat on moral, cultural issues.”
The Syria Accountability Act was passed in December 2003 and was essentially a round of harsh sanctions on the Assad government “for its support for terrorism, its occupation of Lebanon, weapons of mass destruction programs, illegal imports of Iraqi oil, and its role in the ongoing security problems in the Middle East.” Fundamentally an affront to Syrian sovereignty for offenses that we engage in every single day, this bill also likely strengthened the Assad regime.
The Iran Freedom and Support Act of 2006 was similar to the Iraq Liberation Act of 1998 in that it appropriated tens of millions of dollars to give to questionable dissident groups within the country in order to actuate regime change. In order to believe that the United States government has the responsibility or the authority to foment coups in any country it sees fit (an historical past time for us), and then brag about having drafted the bill to authorize such actions, you have to be a pretty radical interventionist for military empire. And that’s exactly what Santorum is.
[He has even more extreme positions, like mandating the National Language to be English. If he would want to force that kind of conformity, who knows what it’ll look like on issues of national security.]
And about these lectures he’s been giving on radical jihadism…The likelihood that Rick Santorum knows anything at all about Islamic jihad is about equivalent to the Earth crashing into the moon tomorrow. What he means to say there is that he has been going around the country stirring up fear and hysteria with pure paranoia about some three century old plot to install sharia law through an Islamic caliphate over America. This is based on nothing, of course. At the risk of suggesting that this fear is a notion worth pursuing, you can check out the ACLU’s report debunking the myth here.
Bottom line? Fear Santorum’s candidacy.
Update: One of Santorum’s primary talking points against the Obama administration is that he has “appeased” other countries and that our “enemies” don’t sufficiently fear President Obama. From this, we can get a pretty clear picture of how Santorum would run the world if given the chance.
“The Iranians, they are moving full-scale forward with their nuclear program and they know the president is not going to do anything to stop them,” Santorum said Monday. “He has been a paper tiger and they are an existential threat to the state of Israel, and the Israelis know it and the American’s know it. And this president has not stepped forward and done anything to stop that threat.”
This kind of psychotic babble is almost good enough to be satire, and it is based on pure fantasy. The Iranians are not moving full-scale forward with their nuclear program. As has been reported, there is not a shred of evidence for that contention. It is merely a fabrication, like his seething, frenzied fear of sharia law in America, that he stirs up in order to scare people into conformity with war policy. Furthermore, to say that Obama has done nothing, is simply untrue. Santorum is banking on the fact that most idiot voters will not check up on what he says, but Obama has either continued or intensified the neoconservative policies of Santorum’s friend George W. Bush. To stop that supposed threat, Obama has expanded covert operations on the ground, confronted Iran through cyber-attacks, and engaged in economic warfare and sabotage, among other things.
