The GOP's foreign-policy wasteland

At first, I was wary of Mike Huckabee's foreign policy prowess (or lack of it). Now, I just want to cry. First he didn't know what the NIE on Iran's nuclear program was about. Then he thought Pakistan was still under martial law. I mean, turning the assassination of Benazir Bhutto into an illegal-immigration stump was just disastrous:

"'In light of what happened in Pakistan yesterday, it's interesting that there are more Pakistanis who have illegally crossed the border than of any other nationality except for those immediately south of our border,' Huckabee said Friday.

...Huckabee said 660 Pakistanis entered the country illegally last year. When asked by a reporter the source for that statistic, Huckabee appeared unsure, saying, 'Those are numbers that I got today from a briefing, and I believe they are CIA and immigration numbers.' The Huckabee campaign later said the figure came from a March 2006 report by The Denver Post.

But the Border Patrol told CNN on Friday that it apprehended only 'a handful' of illegal immigrants from Pakistan in 2007.

The number of illegal immigrants from Pakistan deported or apprehended is not mentioned in the latest report from the Department of Homeland Security/Office of Immigration Statistics. In 2005, the nation did not make the list of the top 10 sources of illegal immigrants. The previous year, Pakistan was the last country listed, but no specific numbers were given."

And now this:

"On Friday morning, Huckabee listed former U.N. Ambassador John Bolton as someone with whom he either has 'spoken or will continue to speak.'

At a Thursday evening news conference, Huckabee said, 'I've corresponded with John Bolton, who's agreed to work with us on developing foreign policy.'

Bolton, however, has a different view. 'I’d be happy to speak with Huckabee, but I haven’t spoken with him yet,' said Bolton, now a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank in Washington.

...Huckabee said he had also spoken with former State Department official Richard Haass (now president of the Council on Foreign Relations); military analyst Ken Allard; former national security adviser Richard Allen; former House Speaker Newt Gingrich; Frank Gaffney, founder of the Center for Security Policy, a conservative think tank; and a 'number of military personnel.'

Reached via e-mail, Allen said an intermediary asked him to speak with Huckabee, but he hadn't yet agreed. 'I'm gradually getting older, but am fully capable of recalling with whom I have spoken,' said the former Nixon and Reagan foreign policy campaign adviser."

I cannot support a candidate who's so out to lunch on foreign policy. And that's a beef I have with Mitt Romney as well, who delivered a similarly lame response to the Bhutto assassination:

"'If the answer for leading the country is someone that has a lot of foreign policy experience, we can just go down to the State Department and pick up any one of the tens of thousands of people who spent all their life in foreign policy,' he said Thursday in New Hampshire.

Instead, Mr. Romney said, what is needed is a chief executive with leadership and the ability to assemble 'a great team of people to be able to guide and direct them to understand what decision has to be made.'"

Who really wants a president who's leaning on a stable of "yes"-men, who needs aides whispering in his ear every time he meets with a foreign delegation? A leader knows the issues and knows how to make decisions, not someone who brushes off the importance of foreign policy expertise.