Establishment GOP candidates pledged their fidelity to the foreign policy objectives of AIPAC as they strived to outdo each other in belligerent rhetoric aimed at Iran. Romney, Santorum and Gingrich promised to support an attack some analysts predict will occur in June.
“If Iran doesn’t get rid of nuclear facilities, we will tear them down ourselves,” said Rick Santorum, who has expressed strongly worded anti-Iran sentiment in the past. In January Santorum said he would not hesitate to launch an attack on Iran.
Attacking Iran over its unsubstantiated nuclear weapons program has remained at the forefront of his presidential campaign.
In November, appearing before a small crowd in rural New Hampshire, Santorum called for a “preemptive strike” following a less than conclusive IAEA report on Iran’s nuclear program.
“As I’ve sat and watched this play out on the world stage, I have seen a president who has been reticent,” the former Pennsylvania senator said from the AIPAC stage in the nation’s capitol while the other candidates remained on the campaign trial.
Mitt Romney delivered a satellite video speech to the convention.
Romney said he would end Obama’s “procrastination” on confronting Iran by imposing further draconian sanctions. “I will make sure Iran knows of the very real peril that awaits if it becomes nuclear,” he said.
“As president, I will be ready to engage in diplomacy. But I will be just as ready to engage our military might,” Romney said.
Newt Gingrich also addressed the convention via satellite link from his home state of Georgia. He criticized Clinton’s State Department for its policy on Iran and characterized U.S. intelligence as “timid.”
In February, American intelligence analysts said that there is no definitive evidence that Iran has decided to build a nuclear bomb. The CIA and more than a dozen other intelligence agencies said Iran halted attempts to build a nuclear weapon in 2003. Iran has been unable to enrich uranium to a level required for a nuclear weapon.
Despite the assessment by intelligence analysts, Gingrich told AIPAC he believes Iran has crossed a “red line” with its nuclear program and was “deepening their commitment to nuclear weapons while we talk.”
“I will provide all available intelligence to the government, ensure that they have the equipment necessary, and reassure them, that if a prime minister decides that he has to avoid the threat of a second Holocaust through pre-emptive measures, that I would require no advance notice,” he said.
Members of Congress argue that Iran will engage in genocide and a second Holocaust if they manage to produce a nuclear weapon.
Congress and the establishment media repeatedly cite a mistranslation of a speech delivered by Iranian president Ahmadinejad in 2008.
The remark is attributed to a deliberate Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI) mistranslation.
MEMRI is an Israel-centric propaganda tool run by a former colonel in intelligence and specializes in dredging up obscure antisemitic remarks made by Arab and Muslim critics of the Jewish state.
The AIPAC speeches by Romney, Santorum and Gingrich reveal that the number one political issue this election season is not the economy or the welfare of the American people, but the interests of fanatical Likudnik warmongers in Israel who are determined to attack Iran and initiate not only a conflagration in the Middle East, but a Third World War.
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