Republican presidential hopeful Herman Cain told reporters and editors at the hawkish Washington Times that he would attack Iran if the Islamic Republic “mess(ed) with Israel.” Cain was responding to a question as to whether he agreed with former Ambassador John Bolton that the U.S. should preemptively strike Iran’s nuclear program. Cain said he agreed with Bolton, but the scenario he laid out amounts to a retaliatory war, not a preemptive one.

The Washington Times’s Ben Birnbaum described Cain’s position:

“There would be some other pieces of information I would need before I gave that order, but I’m saying that would be Option B,” Mr. Cain said during an interview with editors and reporters at The Washington Times.

“Option A is, ‘Folks, we are not going to allow you to attack Israel‘ … If they call my bluff, they already know — they will know — what Option B is.”

Mr. Cain said that, as commander-in-chief, he would “make it crystal clear [that] if you mess with Israel, you’re messing with the United States of America,” but stressed that his “Cain Doctrine” would not be a “blank check” for Israeli military action.

Cain went onto say that if Iran attacked Israel, he would not “sit back and get a vote from the United Nations.” That sounds like deterrence — sometimes called “mutually assured destruction” — not the preemptive strike for which Bolton has spent years agitating.

According to the Washington Times story, the former Godfather’s Pizza CEO-turned-candidate also met on Monday with Israel’s ambassador to the U.S., Michael Oren.

Early on in the campaign season, Cain proved completely clueless about the “right of return” in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and told voters during a GOP debate that he didn’t know enough yet about Afghanistan to make a strategic decision. More recently, Cain wrongly thought that the U.S. still officially recognized Taiwan.

It’s no wonder, then, that even some on the far-right have taken to calling Cain a “Foreign Policy Ignoramus At Large.”

CNN Pentagon correspondent Barbara Starr reported this weekend on a program used to train military doctors for the fast-paced and bloody environment found in war zone hospitals — namely, America’s inner cities.

Starr follows a rotation of military doctors who are preparing for their deployment at the University of Maryland Shock Trauma Center in Baltimore. The program director told Starr that the hospital is the closest to a war zone hospital he has seen:

COL. DAVID POWERS: The injuries that I’ve treated here and that I see here at this hospital are the closest thing to the injuries I saw in Iraq that I’ve experienced in the continental United States.

Watch a clip:

While the program is no doubt useful for preparing doctors for the high-intensity environments overseas and likewise giving doctors broad sets of skills they can use at home, that doctors can train for war zones through the crush of patients with, among other injuries, stabbing and gunshot wounds serve as a powerful reminder that as the wars overseas wind down, problems at home remain.

The total spending on the U.S.’ wars now exceeds $1.2 trillion. The Pentagon budget passed by the House earlier this month allocated nearly $200 billion this year for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Meanwhile, Baltimore ranks as the eighth most dangerous city, second in its reported HIV/AIDS rate, and is the heroin capital of the country.

Last week, Iraqi President Jalal Talabani said Iraq’s various political blocs will make a decision within two weeks on whether to ask the United States for a continued military presence beyond 2011.

But Reuters reports today that according to Iraqi security officials, Iraq is “unlikely” to ask the U.S. for an extended military presence. Instead, Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki is seeking military “trainers,” instead of troops, which will allow him to bypass parliamentary approval for a continued U.S. stay:

In a recent interview with state-owned Iraqiya television, Maliki appeared to signal he favored the trainer strategy when he said it would be difficult to secure a majority in parliament for a troop extension, but that a training contingent would not need lawmakers’ approval.

“We have received and bought American weapons, tanks, planes, and will buy fighter jets, and we have warships. It is necessary that we have trainers (for the equipment),” he said.

“That’s why we have decided in the National Security Council that we need a keep a number of American trainers.”

“If the political blocs refused to announce their final decision on the U.S. withdrawal…Maliki would go it alone and sign memorandums of understanding with the American side,” said a senior lawmaker in Maliki’s State of Law party.

According to Reuters, sources said the trainers would not be active duty military “but rather contractors with military or security backgrounds. They would not conduct combat operations.” While it appears then that the Iraqis are eyeing private security contractors, the State Department is already expected to spend nearly $3 billion on “a 5,100-strong force to protect diplomatic personnel, guard embassy buildings and operate a fleet of aircraft and armored vehicles.”

Last week, President Obama said cutting military spending by $1 trillion over the next 10 years goes too far. Referring to White House’s fiscal commission co-chaired by Erskine Bowles and former GOP Sen. Alan Simpson, Obama said of the $1 trillion figure:

There were aspects of Bowles-Simpson that I said from very early on were not the approach I would take. I’ll give you an example. On defense spending. … I think we need to cut defense, but as Commander-in-Chief, I’ve got to make sure that we’re cutting it in a way that recognizes we’re still in the middle of a war, we’re winding down another war, and we’ve got a whole bunch of veterans that we’ve got to care for as they come home.

However, yesterday on CBS’s Face The Nation, Sen. Tom Coburn (R-OK), outlining his $9 trillion deficit reduction plan, said cutting the $1 trillion in military spending wouldn’t be too hard:

COBURN: We can save a trillion dollars at the Pentagon over the next ten years, not hard. It’s– it’s difficult, but it is not super hard. It’s common sense.

Watch it:

Coburn’s right. It’s not that hard. CAP’s Larry Korb, Laura Conley and Alex Rothman recently outlined how the U.S. government can “save $400 billion through 2015 without harming U.S. national security.”

In addition to Simpson-Bowles, other debt and deficit reduction task forces have recommended reducing military spending by at least $1 trillion over the next decade as well, a move which would, as Korb notes, “bring defense levels back to the Cold War average in inflation adjusted dollars.”

Last month, Rep. Dana Rohrabacher (R-CA) offensively proposed to the Iraqi Prime Minister that Iraq monetarily repay the United States for invading and occupying his country. Rohrabacher has stood by his words since and refused to apologize.

Now, ThinkProgress has unearthed a radio clip from 2008 where current GOP presidential primary candidate Herman Cain offered a similar suggestion. During a conversation with radio hosts Neal Boortz and Clark Howard, Boortz suggested that Iraq “pay us back with oil.” Cain responded that there’s “a lot of merit” to the idea and that we “should be getting paid back some of that money”:

BOORTZ: Why don’t we tell Iraq pay us back with oil?

CAIN: I think there’s a lot of merit into that idea. They’re having their political interum squabbles, when we should be getting paid back some of that money.

Watch it:

One has to wonder how Cain and Rohrabacher expect Iraqis to seriously want to repay the United States for an invasion that resulted in the deaths of hundreds of thouands of people, millions of refugees, and a shattered national infrastructure.