“The Hutton Hotel is now under Sharia law.”

That was the response from William Murray, the chairman of a major anti-Muslim conference, after Hutton Hotels’ parent company cancelled its hosting contract for next month’s event in Tennessee. The “Preserving Freedom Conference” had been shaping up to be a veritable who’s-who among anti-Sharia leaders, including Atlas Shrugs blogger Pamela Gellar, Center for Security Policy president Frank Gaffney, and former Republican Congressman Fred Grandy.

According to The Tennessean, the hotel cancelled its contract after learning more about the conference’s agenda. It’s unclear whether the event organizers will be able to secure another location:

Hutton Hotels’ parent company has confirmed it won’t host the Nov. 11 Preserving Freedom conference, which was slated to include some of the nation’s leading opponent of Sharia law.

Steve Eckley, senior vice president of hotels for Amerimar Enterprises, said he wasn’t fully aware of the topic or the people involved when he booked the event in Nashville, and now he fears that resulting protests could turn violent. As well, the hotel’s other clients that day expressed concerns.

You can thank Hutton Hotel here.

Tennessee has been at the epicenter of the Islamophobia movement for some time. A proposed addition to an already-existing mosque in Murfreesboro has sparked an uproar among those suspicious of Muslims. Last year, someone poured flammable liquid on the construction site in an apparent arson attempt. More recently, leading GOP presidential candidate Herman Cain visited Murfreesboro in July and declared, incorrectly, that communities had the right to ban mosques if they so wished.

This is the second time in as many weeks that hotels have cancelled contracts rather than host anti-Muslim activists. Last week, the Hyatt Place hotel in Sugar Land, Texas cancelled a local Tea Party meeting after learning that one of the nation’s leading Islamophobes, Pam Geller, would be headlining the event.

For more information on Geller, Gaffney, and other leading anti-Muslim activists, read the Center for American Progress’ report, “Fear, Inc.: The Roots of the Islamophobia Network in America.”

The GOP presidential candidates came out swinging at President Obama after he announced last week that he would follow through with President Bush’s 2008 agreement to withdraw all U.S. troops from Iraq by the end of this year. Further validating the point that the Republican party is completely lost on foreign policy issues, their attacks haven’t really made much sense. Rick Santorum said Obama lost the Iraq war and Michele Bachmann charged that Obama is a failure because the Iraqis don’t respect him.

Newt Gingrich took the charade a bit further this weekend. On Friday, Gingrich told a reporter in Florida that Obama’s decision was the right one:

“This is not about Obama,” he continued. “This is about the general effort that far transcends Iraq. That we have to really reassess our strategies in the region and what we think we’re accomplish. The president is right. You can’t just leave 3,000 or 5,000 troops there. They would simply become targets. If you’re not going to occupy the country, you have to withdraw.”

Yet two days later, in a speech at the Iowa Faith & Freedom Coalition’s presidential candidate forum, Gingrich suggested that Obama is ushering defeat by withdrawing:

GINGRICH: The president has announced what will be seen by historians as a decisive defeat for the U.S. in Iraq. … After eight years, thousands of lives, hundreds of billions of dollars, we will leave in defeat. Don’t kid yourself, it is defeat. Iran is stronger.

Watch a compilation of the two clips:

In 2006, Gingrich decided that it was an “enormous mistake” to occupy Iraq after taking Baghdad in 2003, despite the fact that up until that point, he’d been a vocal supporter of the war. And now, Gingrich is again trying to have it both ways, staking out the popular position in saying that Obama was “right” to pull all U.S. troops out of Iraq, but then pandering to the right-wing base, suggesting that his decision means defeat.

The Republicans’ incoherence on foreign policy was on full display during yesterday’s political talk shows. Trying to attack President Obama on Libya, Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-MN), on Fox News Sunday, actually ended up admitting that Muammar Qaddafi would still be in power today if she was president.

On Face The Nation, Bachmann took a swing at Obama for announcing that the U.S. would withdrawal all troops from Iraq by the end of the year, as scheduled. But in this case, she also had some words for the Iraqis for wanting the Americans to leave:

BACHMANN: And here the United States has expended forty-four hundred lives, over eight hundred billion dollars in toil and blood and treasure. And while we’re on the way out, we’re being kicked out by the very people that we liberated. … And to think that we are so disrespected and they — they have so little fear of the United States that there would be nothing that we would gain from this.

Immunity for U.S. troops from Iraqi law proved to be one of the main points of disagreement between the U.S. and Iraq in keeping American troops there past 2011. Later, host Bob Schieffer asked Bachmann if she’d keep U.S. troops in Iraq without immunity. “Well, of course, not. No president could,” she said:

SCHIEFFER: The conditions that the Iraqis laid down, that our troops would have no immunity there, that if they wanted to, they could arrest any American soldier and just throw him into jail. Would you as President have left American troops in that country under those conditions?

BACHMANN: Well, of course, not. No president could. We could not allow our troops to be subject to that. But again we are there as the nation that liberated these people. And that’s the thanks that the United States is getting after forty-four hundred lives were expended and over eight hundred billion dollars? And so on the way out, we’re being kicked out of the country? I think this is absolutely outrageous what’s happened. And I think President Obama clearly is not respected. The United States is not respected. And the President has been a failure when it comes to foreign policy.

Watch the clip:

So by saying that the Iraqis “kicked” out the Americans, Bachmann seems to acknowledge that the they had some say in whether U.S. troops stayed past 2011. But at the same time, according to Bachmann, Obama’s decision to withdraw troops from Iraq represents how his foreign policy is a “failure,” yet, as she admitted, she also would not have allowed the American military to stay without immunity.

Last Friday, President Obama announced a total troop withdrawal from Iraq at the end of year to signify that “after nine years, America’s war in Iraq will be over.” Naturally, the 2012 GOP presidential field took this historic opportunity to unleash vitriol on the president for his decision. Mitt Romney called it an “astonishing failure to secure an orderly transition,” wondering whether “naked political calculation or simply sheer ineptitude” was behind it. Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-MN) called it a “complete failure,” while Jon Huntsman downgraded it to a “mistake.” Yesterday on CBS’s Face the Nation, candidate Rick Santorum joined the “scathing” peanut gallery by telling host Bob Schieffer that Obama essentially “lost the war in Iraq“:

SANTORUM: We have a President who is not able to set conditions and to actually have the kind of influence over the Iraqi government. Now three years the President has had to– to work with the Iraqi government to try to mold and shape that relationship. And to be in a position where really the Iranians now have more sway over the Iraqi government than the United States just shows the weakness of our– our diplomatic effort, the weakness of this President, in being able to shape the battlefield if you will. And I think that’s the reason people were so upset that, you know, we’ve lost– in many respects we’ve lost control and lost the war in Iraq, because we have Iran having broadened its sphere of influence.

Watch it:

When pushed on why a president would leave troops in a country that would not support — and would prosecute — U.S. soldiers, Santorum insisted we were no longer wanted because “we’ve lost this sphere of influence” to Iran. He argued that because Obama didn’t offer more support to Iranian protesters a few years ago, he “tacitly supported the mullahs and [Iranian President Mahmoud] Ahmadinejad.” As a result, “they now have this huge sphere of influence because they know the United States is simply not going to do anything to stop them from going and spreading their venom.”

While it’s important to note that Obama is following the agreement President Bush negotiated and signed,, as with many of his views, Santorum’s desire to stay in Iraq contrasts starkly with the American people.

When President Obama announced last week that the U.S. troop presence in Iraq would end as scheduled on Dec. 31 — after nearly nine years, thousands of U.S. troops casualties, and hundreds of billions of dollars spent — right-wing criticisms started pouring in. A neoconservative architect of the Iraq war twisted his benchmarks (yet again) to call Obama’s scheduled withdrawal a “retreat.” And GOP presidential candidates came out in opposition to the withdrawal, ignoring altogether any Iraqi say in the matter and Americans’ opposition to the war.

But now, underscoring fractures in the Republican Party on foreign policy, a right-wing member of Congress is voicing consternation with his party about opposition to the pullout. Rep. Dana Rohrabacher (R-CA) tweeted on Sunday that he didn’t understand the position from his party and its presidential candidates:

Former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney and Texas Gov. Rick Perry both blasted Obama last week for the withdrawal announcement, and other candidates followed suit until the entire field found itself in universal opposition to the drawdown.

The critiques from the GOP field have ignored two key points in the withdrawal. The first is that the agreement that is ushering out U.S. troops was signed in 2008 by the Bush administration (PDF), amid concerns that the pact would tie the next president’s hands.

The second is Iraqi agency in the pullout. Iraqis were eager to see U.S. troops leave. Former U.S. Ambassador to Iraq Christopher Hill wrote this weekend that “Prime Minister Maliki got very little support from any other Iraqi political [bloc].” The government also opposed immunity from Iraqi law for remaining U.S. troops. Al-Maliki said this weekend that it was “impossible to grant immunity to a single American soldier.” The Pentagon had insisted on such immunity for troops to remain, and the U.S. policy changed as a result of Iraq’s decision.

Over at Democracy Arsenal, Michael Cohen takes down the Republican attacks on Obama’s Iraq decision:

What is perhaps so maddening about this entire line of argument from the GOP that Obama has “failed” in Iraq is that it was Republicans…who were the loudest advocates of the 2007 surge on the grounds that escalation would help a sovereign, democratic government (as well as political reconciliation) take root in Iraq. [...] Republicans can’t have this both ways: they can’t on the one hand extol the virtues of democracy in Iraq and then get indignant when that country’s democratically-elected government tells the United States they need to leave.

“If there was ever any question that the GOP’s fundamental critique of President Obama’s foreign policy is basically ‘whatever he does we will argue the opposite,’” Cohen adds, “this past week should erase any doubts.”