US citizen Ami Isseroff at MideastWeb:
From a distance, here are impressionistic views of an American citizen on how American presidential candidates stack up on foreign policy. These views are impressionistic because they represent not the unknowable substance of the candidates’ real foreign policy knowledge and positions, but only what they may show us in their Web sites and public foreign policy statements, filleted through my own faulty perception of those views. If these impressions are incorrect, I hope that readers will hasten to correct them.
The Iowa caucus results may not mean much. It is hard to believe that Mike Huckabee, for example, can really become a national candidate based on those results, or that Rudy Giuliani is really finished as a presidential candidate. But these non-binding popularity contests give us a sense of what Americans want and what is important to them.
He continues:
All the major U.S. candidates are against terrorism. Don’t laugh. In a free election in the Middle East, that unanimity could not be taken for granted, and that stance would not necessarily be popular. In Iran or the Palestinian territories, it would not be a viable political stance. However, most of the candidates seem to be unaware of how woefully unprepared the United States is to fight terrorism, or what has to be done to correct the problem. Nobody gets into the problem of where all the billions went in Iraq, or why US forces never seem to be able to prevent terror attacks there.
All the major Democratic candidates promise to withdraw from Iraq no matter what, and all the Republican candidates promise that US troops will stay in Iraq no matter what and fight to victory. They must all be intelligent enough to realize that arising contingencies may force them to pursue different policies, but in a democracy, you need to tell the people what you think they want to hear in order to win elections.
He ends with:
The soundest foreign policy statement of any of the candidates is just horse sense. In just about a year, one of these people is going to be running the United States, and effectively, the world. Scary, isn’t it?