Whom do you trust to confront Iran?

While voters in the United States swarmed to the polls in the freezing tempertures in Iowa and New Hampshire for the presidential primaries this week, Iranian speedboats buzzed U.S. Naval vessels in the super-heated waters of the Straits of Hormuz.

The actions by Iran in the Persian Gulf snagged the attention of the world because of the stunning daring by Iranian speedboats last March of 14 British sailors, capturing them and then humilitating the U.K. with their highly publicized ”release.”

The threatening actions by Iranians also aroused deeply painful memories of American sailors in the wake of the Oct. 12, 2000 suicide bombing of the USS Cole off the coast of Yemen by militants tied to al-Qaida.

What might a nuclear-armed Iran do under the leadership of the deranged fundamentalist Islamist, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad? Or even scarier radical fundamentalist Mullahs who are pulling the strings?

More to the point, how would the leading presidential candidates respond to acts of aggression by Iran?

It’s a fair question to ask at this perilous moment in time.

So, as voters head to the polls, they will have to decide who they want to have in the Oval Office to deal with one of the world’s most dangerous regimes.

Democrat leaders talk a tough game

Sen. Hillary Clinton angered liberals last year when she voted for an amendment that declared Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps a foreign terrorist organization. However, it was little more than one week later that she traveled to the anti-war beachhead of the San Francisco Bay area to announce to peace activists that she’d co-sponsor a bill barring the White House from spending any money to wage war in Iran. It’s a familiar pattern with Mrs. Clinton.

But, the same type of duplicitous positioning has been seen from Sen. Barack Obama.

Before the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, Obama declared that military force against Iran should not be taken off the table, calling Ahmidinejad’s regime, ”a threat to us all.”

In the same breath, Sen. Barack Hussein Obama would go on to denounce Operation Iraqi Freedom, calling for the withdrawal of U.S. troops from Iraq.

Instead of military force, Obama said he’d much rather prefer ”aggressive diplomacy combined with tough sanctions.”

Remember, that approach was the same one used by the United States against Saddam Hussein’s regime in Iraq unsuccessfully for years.

Take note that was Obama’s toughest line taken against the U.S.-backed regime in Pakistan who Obama threatened to bomb if they didn’t do a better job of wiping out al-Qaida cells in Pakistan.

Such wildly inconsistent positions by Clinton and Obama, tough guy the one day, ambassadors of good will the next, are exactly why none of the Democratic candidates for president can be trusted to deal with the threats of Islamic extremism and terrorism.

On the Republican side, the only candidates who have offered a clear and consistent stand against Iran and Islamic jihadists have been former Sen. Fred Thompson, former Mayor Rudy Giuliani, former Gov. Mitt Romney, Rep. Duncan Hunter and Sen. John McCain.

As readers of this column suspect, my heart in the presidential campaign is with Sen. Thompson, who offers a ”tell-it-like-it-is” approach to the issues of the day.

Thompson’s greatest weakness on the campaign trail is his greatest strength as a leader – he is unwilling to jump through hoops to appease those who tell him how to act. That includes both the news media and his political opponents.

Fred Thompson won’t repackage himself in order to manipulate the public to vote for him. Either you agree or disagree with his stance on the issue, and either you accept him as a leader or you don’t.

With Thompson apparently staking his campaign on the South Carolina primary, we’ll know soon enough if he is to reclaim the role of frontrunner on the GOP side. If he is unable to rekindle support for his campaign, Republicans will have to look toward one of the other tough-on-defense Republican candidates (Giuliani, Romney, Hunter or McCain) to offer the best hope for leadership on the issues of national security.

Don’t get me started on the faults of some of those other candidates – with the exception of Hunter, who if not president will make a superb secretary of defense – I’m hoping I don’t have to get to the point of picking the lesser of the evils.

When it comes to who our next president will be, picking the least worse option is something we cannot afford when radical Islamists are working on developing nuclear weapons half a world away.