Huckabee Takes Unfair Shots at Ron Paul

He was alluding to Vice President Dick Cheney's prediction that we'd be greeted in Iraq "with candy and flowers." Paul Wolfowitz, a former Bush aide, claimed that Iraqi oil would pay for the entire war, and some estimates were as low as a few billion dollars. Larry Lindsey, Bush's former economic adviser, was severely criticized for saying the war would cost $100 billion to $200 billion. It has surpassed $700 billion to date.

How can Huckabee call Paul's statement "ludicrous" when the facts speak so strongly to the contrary? The Bush administration hasn't gotten anything right in Iraq: no al Qaeda connection, no weapons of mass destruction, no cost to the taxpayer -- the list goes on and on.

In that same segment, Paul repeated an assertion from a previous debate: "The fact that we had troops in Saudi Arabia was one of the three reasons given for the attack on 9/11." True or not true?

Al Qaeda did issue a fatwa -- a judgment on Islamic law -- saying the United States committed three "crimes": military occupation of the Arabian peninsula, U.S. aggression against Iraqis, and U.S. support for Israel and refusal to recognize Palestinians.

In a prior debate, Paul mentioned Michael Scheuer, a former CIA agent and chief of the agency's bin Laden station from 1996 to 1999. Scheuer, a bin Laden expert whose books include Through Our Enemies' Eyes: Osama bin Laden, Radical Islam and the Future of America and Imperial Hubris, defended Paul's statements at a May 24 press conference and confirmed that al Qaeda's response is blowback from bad policy in the Middle East.