While it’s perhaps understandable that with the primary crunch time imminent, the herd of Presidential primary candidates might be focusing on the campaigns to the exclusion of awareness of other events…perhaps it’s unwise to not pay attention to at least the headlines of major newspapers.
For example, consider this bit of news, as told by the Political Tracker Blog at CNN:
At a dinner with reporters on Tuesday night, Republican presidential candidate Mike Huckabee admitted that he had neither read nor been briefed on the latest national intelligence estimate, which stated that Iran halted its nuclear weapons program in 2003.[...]
That’s kind of a big oops, isn’t it? If foreign policy regarding Iran is one of the hot topics in the campaign, you’d probably want to stay on top of the issue.
(While that faux pas definitely tarnishes my impression of Huckabee, I still have to say that I dislike him least among GOP candidates.)
In fairness, I suppose that it should be pointed out that most of the hooplah surrounding the NIE doesn’t seem to note the less positive part of the disclosure. Quoting a Time article on the subject:
But while asserting that Iran may no longer have a weapons program, the new report also stresses that Iran is continuing to try to develop the technique to enrich uranium on a massive scale and that it could, theoretically, manufacture enough highly enriched uranium, or HEU, to build a bomb “during the 2010-15 time frame”. (Iran says it is enriching uranium for peaceful purposes to use in energy production and does not intend to make any HEU; the NIE says it cannot assess Iran’s ultimate intentions.)
While it would seem that folks with hawkish stances towards Iran ought to be reigned in a bit, I’d say it’s still definitely appropriate to maintain a decent amount of diplomatic pressure on Iran on the subject of its nuclear aspirations.