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GOP debate has one Israel mention, and Santorum points out a policy rift

By Ron Kampeas · September 8, 2011

Just one mention of Israel in the GOP debate last night, by Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-Minn.) when she says that she does not see President Obama as a guarantor of U.S. Security:

The president has not done what he needs to do to keep the United States safe. If you look at the biggest issue in the Middle East, it's a nuclear Iran, and the president has taken his eyes off that prize.

As a matter of fact, what he's done is he's said, in fact, to Israel that, they need to shrink back to their indefensible 1967 borders. I sit on the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence. We deal with the nation's classified secrets. And I firmly believe that the president of the United States has weakened us militarily and put us more at risk than at any time.

I can't know what Bachmann sees on the Intel committee, but Obama doesn't want Israel to shrink to its 1967 lines -- he wants negotiations based on those lines, with mutually agreed swaps and an Israeli security veto over any outcome.

"Taken his eye off the Iran prize" is a little more tricky. It's true Congress wants the president to do much more, using tools in the sanctions chest it approved for his use a year ago -- but he has quantifiably done more to isolate Iran than his predecessors.

The follow-up was perhaps the most substantial part of the foreign policy segment. The moderators cornered Bachmann into saying explicity that she still didn't think Libya was a good idea, despite Obama's success there. Rick Santorum followed up. He got the Libya issue, specifically, wrong -- Obama solicited international support, not the other way around -- but he made, bluntly, a larger point about a growing GOP foreign policy rift.

Well, we're in the Reagan Library, and I'm hearing from at least a couple of people on this panel a very isolationist view of where the Republican Party should be headed about pulling troops out with Governor Huntsman and with Ron Paul.

The bottom line is, Ronald Reagan was committed to America being a force for good around the world. We were a society that believed in ourselves and believed that we can spread our vision to the rest of the world and make this country a safer country as a result of it.

We didn't have missions where we put exit strategies saying this date is when we're going to leave. We didn't say that we are the problem and the cause of the problems that confront us around the world.

We were -- we are a source for good. We could have been a source for good from the very get-go in Libya, but this president was indecisive and confused from the very beginning. He only went along with the Libyan mission because the United Nations told him to, which is something that Ronald Reagan would have melted like the old Wicked Witch of the West before he would have allowed that to happen.

This is a very important issue for our party. Are we going to stand in the Reagan tradition, or are we going to go the isolationist view that some in this party are advocating?

He names Rep. Ron Paul (R-Texas) and former Utah Gov. John Huntsman, but he was looking at Bachmann.