Part I: John McCain

Part II: Hillary Clinton

 To celebrate Mike Huckabee's last stand, I shall finally post the next part of this long-ignored series!

I will first say that I like Mike Huckabee as a person. I find him personable, friendly, soft-spoken, and the fact that he managed to lose so much weight in such little time shows dedication and commitment. That said, Huckabee has so far been a candidate who has made his stand on purely Domestic policy, rather than Foreign policy, but he, like the other candidates for president, has written articles for Foreign Affairs detailing his worldview. Of the four articles, I find his to be most interesting, as it shows how his religion plays a part in his world view.

Most interestingly, is his presentation of the nature of Jihad and the Islamic threat.

Very few Americans are familiar with the writings of Sayyid Qutb, the Egyptian radical executed in 1966, or the Muslim Brotherhood, whose call to active jihad influenced Osama bin Laden and the rise of al Qaeda. Qutb raged against the decadence and sin he saw around him and sought to restore the "pure" Islam of the seventh century through a theocratic caliphate without national borders. He saw nothing decadent or sinful in murdering in order to achieve that end. America's culture of life stands in stark contrast to the jihadists' culture of death.

The United States' biggest challenge in the Arab and Muslim worlds is the lack of a viable moderate alternative to radicalism. On the one hand, there are radical Islamists willing to fight dictators with terrorist tactics that moderates are too humane to use. On the other, there are repressive regimes that stay in power by force and through the suppression of basic human rights -- many of which we support by buying oil, such as the Saudi government, or with foreign aid, such as the Egyptian government, our second-largest recipient of aid.

Here, we see a theme with which a lot of us are doubtlessly familiar. The idea of jihad as a condemnation of American way of life, rather than a condemnation of American policies. I personally heavily disagree with his interpretation of the "lack of moderates within Islam." Indeed, I think if you examine the nature of Islamic governments, men like Mahmoud Ahmadinejad are the exception, rather than the rule. Indeed, although Islamic nations are in large conservative, they are by know means radicalist. This idea of the lack of moderate alternatives is especially disingenous in the face of decades of moderation practiced by Islamic nations like Egypt, Morocco, Turkey and others.

It was President Nixon who spoke of "the silent majority", and I believe this is exactly what we're facing with Islam. Yes, the large majority of Islamic people identify themselves as conservative, but so does the majority of Americans. Are we to believe that the US lacks moderation because of the voices of the loud minority? If taken to its logical conclusion, then Governor Huckabee must believe that the Jerry Falwells, Anne Coulters, Michael Moores of American speaks for all of America - a claim which is quite frankly false.

On fighting military size.

The Bush administration plans to increase the size of the U.S. Army and the Marine Corps by about 92,000 troops over the next five years. We can and must do this in two to three years. I recognize the challenges of increasing our enlistments without lowering standards and of expanding training facilities and personnel, and that is one of the reasons why we must increase our military budget. Right now, we spend about 3.9 percent of our GDP on defense, compared with about six percent in 1986, under President Ronald Reagan. We need to return to that six percent level. And we must stop using active-duty forces for nation building and return to our policy of using other government agencies to build schools, hospitals, roads, sewage treatment plants, water filtration systems, electrical facilities, and legal and banking systems.

The nature of counter-insurgency is not about how many troops you can put on the ground, as American military action in Vietnam has shown. Rather, counter-insurgency is about isolation of the radical elements, the winning of the hearts of the people and elimination of cultural biases. This is the strategy employed by the British post WWII, and it is to the best of my knowledge, the only example of successful stamping out of a counter-insurgency in the history of the modern West. Despite what some claim, counter-insurgency is not a new phenomenon. It cannot be won with numbers or might, but with effective strategy.

On Pakistan

To be sure, Pakistan is an inherently unstable country that has never had a constitutional change of government in its 60 years of existence. It has alternated between military and civilian rule, punctuated by assassinations and coups. Even during times of nominal civilian rule, the army and its affiliated intelligence service, the Inter-Services Intelligence, or ISI, were the country's most powerful institutions. But in the name of stability, the U.S. government has erred on the side of protecting Musharraf. We have an unfortunate tendency to confuse leaders with their countries and their citizens and to back them for too long, with too few questions asked and too few strings attached. As the Bush administration scrambled to cope with Musharraf's state of emergency last November, it became clear that we had no Pakistan policy, only a Musharraf policy.

Musharraf's top priority is not the United States' survival but his own, physical and political. Musharraf has done his best to convince the Bush administration that the United States' destiny and his are inextricably interwoven -- after him, the deluge. But this is not true. He has not kept extremists from seizing power in Pakistan; they have not seized it simply because they have not had the strength or the support to do so. He claims that he declared the state of emergency because of the threat of extremism to Pakistan. In fact, he was responding to a threat not to the country but to himself and not from extremists but from Pakistan's Supreme Court, which was about to invalidate his recent reelection.

This, I absolutely agree with. Until Mussharraf is made accountable, our money and efforts in Pakistan is largely wasted.

In all, I see in Mike Huckabee a man whose vision is shaped by his faith in both God and Reagan. While there is nothing wrong with that in private life, I think an extension of these view points in public office and execution of such policies on the international sphere is dangerous. We cannot treat this as a second coming of the Cold War. There is no second great power with which we can bargain. This modern conflict is a wide-spread insurgency that must be suppressed with new strategies, and not continuation of Cold War era military armaments.

As I said, I like Mike Huckabee as an individual, but I personally would not want him as a president. I think, at some point, it must be said that we are no longer in the 8th century AD. As Fareed Zakaria, CNN foreign policy expert, pointed out, the future of foreign policy should not be focused on the Middle East. Rather, the chief threats to the future of our world exist in the pollution wrought by developing countries like India and China. It is the potential for militarization in areas like Latin America. The threat lays in areas which have been largely ignored by the mainstream - areas too delicate for a man who has shown himself to be as stubborn as Mike Huckabee.