The Absurd Report

Politics: Huckabee vs. Obama would pit an unelectable Republican against a Democrat who would wreck our economy and weaken our security. And both have blasted the president’s success in the war on terror.

According to Mike Huckabee, GOP winner of the Iowa caucuses, the “administration’s arrogant bunker mentality has been counterproductive at home and abroad.” The statement easily could have come from the Democratic Iowa victor, Barack Obama — or John Edwards or Hillary Clinton.

Each has long insisted that the president’s refusal to sit for tea and get to know, Oprah-style, the enablers of terrorism against our troops in Iraq amounts to locking himself in an airtight foreign-policy echo chamber.

But it was that “bunker mentality” Huckabee and the Democrats have such a problem with — which is really simply fortitude, amid the cacophony of inside-the-Beltway defeatism — that saved our skins in Iraq last year.

The president presumably was in that “bunker” when he approved the National Security Agency’s terrorist surveillance program and the CIA’s terrorist interrogation program. Both gleaned information that foiled terrorist plots and saved hundreds if not thousands of lives.

In Foreign Affairs magazine, Huckabee complains about “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.”

He wants to “nurture moderate forces” in such places because “both for us and for the peoples of those countries, it will be better than the dictatorships they have now.”

That sounds frighteningly like taking Jimmy Carter’s policy of abandoning our ally the shah of Iran…