WASHINGTON – It sounded almost like a declaration of war.
Not only would presidential candidate Mike Huckabee use the U.S. military to attack ISIS, he would go after virtually all of radical Islam.
WND asked if he saw the ISIS threat as big enough to commit to a large-scale deployment of U.S. forces in the Mideast.
“I would include not just ISIS but Boko Haram, al-Qaida, Hamas, Hezbollah and the Iranians,” Huckabee replied.
“I think it’s very important for us to understand there are many forms of radical Islam … but they all represent the same evil. And that’s the evil of believing they are here on this earth to murder and destroy every person who does not agree to live under their radical Islamic caliphate.”
The former Arkansas governor isn’t calling for a full-scale intervention yet, but he wouldn’t rule it out.
WND asked: What about boots on the ground?
“Whatever it takes. I don’t think we take anything off the table.”
“One of the mistakes this president has made is he tells the enemy all the things we won’t do,” said the Republican presidential contender. “I would never tell the enemy we wouldn’t do certain things.
“I’d say, ‘Look, here’s what were going to pledge to you: We will take you down and it won’t take us 10 years or 10 months, we’ll try get it done in 10 days.'”
“You never use more resources than are necessary,” he cautioned, “but you never use less than are required to make sure the job is done most efficiently and effectively in the least amount of time and with the least amount of American bloodshed.”
“And we just have to very clear to say, we love our liberty and we’re going to do whatever it takes to defend it and America will not be bullied by a group of people riding around in pickup trucks, waving automatic weapons and blowing up things.”
How would he defeat ISIS?
“By having a military that can very quickly and overwhelmingly put an end to the terrorist activities. We are not applying the kind of pressure we need to be putting in the Middle East on their supply lines – making sure that everything that can be done is being done.”
Huckabee called for sending “A-10 Warthogs (military aircraft designed to destroy tanks and other armored vehicles) over their every truck, every tank and every supply line. Those are some simple things that can and should be done, and why they are not being done is beyond me.”
What would he say to President Obama who recently claimed, “Ideologies are not defeated with guns but better ideas”?
“The statement that the president made that we don’t defeat ideologies with guns is laughable on its face and clearly an indication that this president has no clue about history,” he said.
Huckabee quipped, “I wish somebody could’ve just had a little chat with Hitler and said, ‘Gee your ideology is all wrong, maybe you should read a few books and come to some better ideas.’
“But it wasn’t having a chat with Hitler that defeated the Nazi threat; it was having a military force that crushed him. We’re talking about dealing with bad ideologies that don’t surrender on their own and have no intention of simply reading a better book and coming to a different conclusion.”
“There’s only one way to deal with it,” declared Huckabee. “The president says it’s not guns. I would say it’s the biggest, best, most fierce guns on earth that we do most certainly need, in order to defeat them.”
The GOP presidential candidate said that means bringing the U.S. military “up to a readiness level that is worthy of the world’s most powerful military force. We’re spending about 2 percent of our GDP (gross domestic product) on the military. We’re at the lowest level of readiness since before World War II. We need to be spending about six percent of GDP. We need to be on parity with China on building submarines.
“We need to have the most awesome level of military power that has ever been assembled in the history of mankind. And if somebody wants to take on the United States, they would find themselves on the losing end of the stick.”
When asked if, as president, he would attack Iran to prevent it from getting the bomb, Huckabee said, rather than announce what specific steps he would take, he would first send a clear message to Iran.
“You’re not going to have a nuclear device. Whatever it takes to keep you from having it, that’s what we will employ. But you won’t have one. We’re not going to tell you what we will do. We won’t tell you what we won’t do. We’ll just tell you that the result is a movie that has a final scene you don’t want to see.”
When asked if it was already too late to stop Iran from getting the bomb, the governor called economic sanctions still the most effective tool.
He said the importance of applying economic pressure on adversaries was another reason to accelerate American energy exploration and production.
Huckabee said America could export enough energy to “bankrupt countries like Iran, Russia and the Saudis, and change the balance of power in so doing.”
“Imagine what would happen if we became the greatest energy exporter in the world,” he said. “When that happens, Putin doesn’t have the money to move into Crimea and Ukraine; the Iranians don’t have the money to build the bomb; and the Saudis don’t have the money to finance the madrasas that train the terrorists who kill us. It changes the entire face of the planet.”
Does he have any doubt that Iran is trying to destroy the United States?
“No doubt at all. It’s one thing if a country is subtle about it, and maybe we only think that because of certain clues, but when you have an elected parliament in Iran chanting, ‘Death to America’ and vowing that no one will be able to inspect their military facilities, I think that’s a pretty good indicator that we’re not dealing with an honorable people.”
Huckabee insisted there was no reason to believe for one moment that any nuclear agreement struck with Iran would prove binding.
He said there was nothing about the Iranian government that America can trust and that sanctions should have been increased rather than decreased.
“We should never have gone to the negotiating table with them. We should have done everything we can to bankrupt them. We should never cooperate with them. Because they are simply not only untrustworthy, but they have already declared repeatedly in their chants, even as they pretend to negotiate with us, death to America.”
Huckabee warned that the Obama administration must recognize that the Iranian government is not its friend.
“They are, in fact, our enemy and they have declared they want to go after Israel, which makes them our enemy … We’re sitting there having tea with the Iranians trying to have negotiations. Instead, we need to be going to Jerusalem, standing with (Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin) Netanyahu, and saying we will go shoulder to shoulder to make sure Iran never has nuclear capacity.”
What would the Mideast look like under President Hillary Clinton?
“It would look like even a greater mess than it looks like now under Barack Obama.”
Huckabee maintained, “There’s not a country on this entire planet with whom America has a better relationship than when he took office.
“The last thing we need is a third Obama term, which is what we’d have with Hillary Clinton.”
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