Pakistani Fearmongering

Republican presidential hopeful Mike Huckabee is great on his feet, not so great on facts.

Immediately after the assassination of Pakistan’s Benazir Bhutto, Huckabee said the murder should serve as a reminder to Americans of the importance of closing down the U.S.-Mexico border with a fence because, he said, “we have more Pakistani illegals coming across our border than all other nationalities, except those immediately south of the border.” The claim is false. According to the Department of Homeland Security, there are more Philippinos, Indians, Koreans, Vietnamese and Chinese undocumented immigrants in the United States than Pakistanis. And judging from border apprehensions, a somewhat more accurate measure of who is actually crossing the country’s physical borders illegally, Chinese and Canadian nationals appear in the top nine countries of origin. Pakistanis do not.

Huckabee’s broad-brush indictment of Pakistanis as illegal immigrants or terrorists, even as the perpetrators of Bhutto’s assassination had yet to be identified, is further evidence of Huckabee’s tendency to conflate blame, events and assumptions into dubious conclusions.

Taking On George W. Bush?

He's unafraid to attack George W. Bush directly, especially on foreign policy matters. “American foreign policy needs to change its tone and attitude, open up, and reach out,” he writes in the January/February issue of Foreign Affairs. “The Bush administration’s arrogant bunker mentality has been counterproductive at home and abroad.”Huckabee’s previous sentence suggests how he sees America’s role in the world: “Much like a top high school student, if it is modest about its abilities and achievements, if it is generous in helping others, it is loved. But if it attempts to dominate others, it is despised.”

The approach is presumably meant to contrast with that of Bush. But Huckabee’s words are, in fact, an almost verbatim restatement of George W. Bush’s view of America’s role when Bush, like Huckabee, first campaigned for president. “How,” the moderator asked Bush in his second debate with Al Gore in October 2000, “would you project us around the world, as president?” Bush’s answer: “It really depends upon how our nation conducts itself in foreign policy. If we’re an arrogant nation, they’ll resent us. If we’re a humble nation, but strong, they’ll welcome us. And it’s -- our nation stands alone right now in the world in terms of power, and that’s why we have to be humble.”

The similarities don’t end there. Huckabee: “[W]e must stop using active-duty forces for nation building and return to our policy of using other government agencies to build schools, hospitals, roads, sewage treatment plants, water filtration systems, electrical facilities, and legal and banking systems.” Bush in the same debate with Gore: “I don’t think our troops ought to be used for what’s called nation-building. I think our troops ought to be used to fight and win war.”

Hawkish Eloquences

In the specifics, too, while Huckabee is portraying himself as a different kind of foreign-policy Republican, his approach—to the “war on terror,” Iraq, Afghanistan, Iran, keeping the United States pre-eminent in the world—differs more in rhetoric than in substance from that of Bush. Huckabee is eloquent where Bush is bombastic. Huckabee is articulate where Bush sounds simplistic. But both men share the crusader’s perspective, seeing the fate of the world intimately linked with American willingness not only to protect freedom, but to project it and foment it where it’s wanting.

See my full profile of Mike Huckabee's Middle East Foreign policy.

See also:

• Rudy Giuliani's Middle East Policies
• John McCain's Middle East Policies
• Hillary Clinton's Middle East Policies
• Barack Obama's Middle East Policies