The most-ignored presidential candidate of the Republican field took a lot of heat from Middle East hawks for implying during the recent GOP debate that the threat from Iran was grossly exaggerated. Today on Fox News, he doubled down on that position.

But when pressed on his views by Fox host Megyn Kelly, Paul went even further, declaring that if Iran ever gets a nuclear weapon and attacks Israel, the United States should let Israel respond. Paul noted, however, that Iran probably wouldn’t attack Israel in this scenario because of the latter’s nuclear arsenal. “They’re not suicidal,” Paul said of the Iranians. Here’s the exchange:

KELLY: If you were President Paul and it turned out you were wrong — that it turned out that Iran did have the bomb and it attacked Israel – would you step in?

PAUL: No. I’d let Israel take care of ‘em. Why should we interfere with Israel? We’re always interfering with Israel when they wanna deal with their neighbors. We undermine their national sovereignty. We shouldn’t tell them how to manage their borders. I defended Israel when they took out the nukes in Iraq many many years ago.

Israel has 300 [nukes]. [...] There’s a lot of problems in Iran. There’s no doubt about it. But I tell you what: They’re not suicidal.

Watch the video:

The stance on retaliating on Israel’s behalf sets Paul even farther afield from his fellow GOP candidates, such as Herman Cain, who vowed to attack Iran if it “mess(ed) with Israel.”

On Fox today, Paul reiterated his historical point — lost on Rick Santorum during the debate — that Iran “had a pretty good democracy going in ’53 and we kicked it out — our CIA kicked it out for oil and put in the Shah, and he was a ruthless dictator.” Paul asked indignantly: “And you wonder why there’s blowback?”

The libertarian stalwart also compared Iran to the Soviet Union and China — countries that had “murdered millions of their own people” but were nonetheless engaged by Republican presidents. “We didn’t say the solution was to invade those countries and take their nukes away from them.”

A 12-member “super committee” set up in the debt ceiling deal is tasked with coming up with $1.5 trillion in spending cuts before the end of the year but failure to get an agreement would trigger nearly $600 billion in cuts to national security spending. Defense Secretary Leon Panetta has been campaigning to prevent further cuts to the Pentagon’s budget, having called the trigger a “doomsday mechanism” for the Defense Department. Except Panetta hasn’t offered any details as to how he has come to this conclusion, and experts have pointed out that the U.S. can easily sustain even more military spending reductions than those that are contained in the the trigger.

Yet, Panetta was at it again during a joint appearance with Secretary of State Hillary Clinton this morning at the National Defense University. Clinton maintained that in order to reduce the debt and deficit, “everything” has to be on the table, including the State Department budget, which is measly in comparison to DOD’s. But Panetta couldn’t hold back, calling the spending cuts trigger “devastating.” Panetta continued:

“It would result in hollowing out the force. It would terribly weaken our ability to respond to the threats in the world. But more importantly, it would break faith with the troops and with their families,” Panetta said. “And a volunteer army is absolutely essential to our national defense. Any kind of cut like that would literally undercut our ability to put together the kind of strong national defense we have today.”

In a letter to the editor in the Washington Post last weekend, CAP defense budget expert Larry Korb explained that this is nonsense:

Even if the defense budget were reduced by the entire $1 trillion, or about $100 billion a year over the next decade, it would amount to a reduction of about 15 percent. This would, in real terms, allow the Pentagon to spend at its 2007 level for the next decade. Our equipment is aging not because of a lack of funds but because of poor management of this gusher of defense spending. Over the past decade, the Pentagon has spent about $50 billion on weapons it had to cancel, and cost overruns on major weapons programs have neared $300 billion.

In 2007, the United States enjoyed military superiority over every other nation on earth many times over; the U.S. maintained its military presence around the world and surged in Iraq after four years of war there — all while fighting a war in Afghanistan since 2001. Yet, despite the U.S. military’s strength at that time, Panetta appears to believe that making the Pentagon hark back to its 2007 budgets would be “devastating.”

Commentary’s Abe Greenwald has written a long piece examining “What We Got Right in the War on Terror” over the last 10 years. It’s worth reading, if only to understand how the George W. Bush boosters are still very much committed to creating their own reality.

To take one example, here’s Greenwald giving Bush credit for the Arab awakening:

It was the Freedom Agenda of the George W. Bush administration—delineated and formulated as a conscious alternative to jihadism—that showed the way. Indeed, the costly American nation-building in Iraq has now led to the creation of the world’s first and only functioning democratic Arab state. One popular indictment of Bush maintains that he settled on the Freedom Agenda as justification for war after U.S. forces and inspectors found no Iraqi weapons of mass destruction. The record shows otherwise. “A free Iraq can be a source of hope for all the Middle East,” he said before the invasion, in February 2003. “Iraq can be an example of progress and prosperity in a region that needs both.”

And something of the kind has come to pass. “One despot fell in 2003,” [Fouad] Ajami has said. “We decapitated him. Two despots, in Tunisia and Egypt, fell, and there is absolutely a direct connection between what happened in Iraq in 2003 and what’s happening today throughout the rest of the Arab world.”

It’s probably a devastating enough rebuttal just to note that that quote from Fouad Ajami, one of the Iraq war’s most committed cheerleaders, constitutes the entirety of Greenwald’s evidence that the Iraq war spurred the democracy movements throughout the Arab world.

This is understandable, as there is no real evidence for the claim. Arabs themselves clearly don’t agree, as all available polling shows the war to be overwhelmingly unpopular in the region. An April 2010 RAND study also concluded that, rather than encouraging reform, “Iraq’s instability has become a convenient scarecrow neighboring regimes can use to delay political reform by asserting that democratization inevitably leads to insecurity.”

Examining the claim in an article back in July, the Council on Foreign Relations’ Steven Cook concluded, “It is time to put the Bush boosters’ arguments where they belong: in the trash heap of discredited ideas”:

There is no connection between the invasion of Iraq and Arab efforts to throw off generations of dictatorship. Other than helping to shape the Middle East’s discourse about political change, the effects of the Freedom Agenda are inconclusive at best. It is entirely possible that the uprisings would have happened without George W. Bush, or if he had been more like his father. Bush 41 placed a premium on international order rather than democratic change and, let’s not forget, presided over massive pro-democratic change anyway.

Back to Greenwald:

Meanwhile, as the noble call for representative government continues to be heard by Muslims around the region, let us not forget that the one existing democratic country among them is the successful American project in Mesopotamia.

From Saturday’s New York Times:

As leaders in the Arab world and other countries condemn President Bashar al-Assad’s violent crackdown on demonstrators in Syria, Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki of Iraq has struck a far friendlier tone, urging the protesters not to “sabotage” the state and hosting an official Syrian delegation.

Mr. Maliki’s support for Mr. Assad has illustrated how much Iraq’s position in the Middle East has shifted toward an axis led by Iran. And it has also aggravated the fault line between Iraq’s Shiite majority, whose leaders have accepted Mr. Assad’s account that Al Qaeda is behind the uprising, and the Sunni minority, whose leaders have condemned the Syrian crackdown.

Today’s Los Angeles Times:

A series of blasts and gunshots ripped across Iraq on Monday, killing at least 70 people and wounding more than 300 in a spasm of bloodshed that raised fresh concerns that the nation’s security forces might be overwhelmed by insurgents when American soldiers withdraw later this year. [...] It appeared Iraq was in a time warp, a nation still struggling with terrorists, sectarian gangs and militias at a time much of the Arab world is moving to replace extremism through revolutions for democracy.

As my colleagues and I wrote in our May 2010 report, The Iraq War Ledger, there is simply no conceivable calculus by which Operation Iraqi Freedom can be judged to have been a successful or worthwhile policy. The war was intended to show the extent of America’s power. It succeeded only in showing its limits. We’ll be dealing with the implications of that for many years to come, regardless of whether the war’s advocates can bring themselves to face it.

Cross-posted from Middle East Progress.