COLUMBIA, South Carolina — Former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee (R) ripped the Republican Party during a South Carolina speech today, saying he doesn’t want to be associated with a party that would zero-out foreign aid and calling such a move “un-Christian.”

Speaking at a U.S. Global Leadership Coalition luncheon in Columbia, Huckabee told the largely-Republican crowd that their party had lost its way on the issue of foreign aid. In debate after debate, Republican presidential candidates have competed to determine which of them could be the most critical of American foreign aid funding. When the candidates gathered in South Carolina last fall, Newt Gingrich, Rick Perry, and Mitt Romney all proposed zeroing out foreign aid funding. “You ought to start off at zero and say, explain to me why I should give you a penny,” Gingrich said.

Huckabee, who was tasked with introducing Gingrich at the event, addressed the Republican Party’s dismissal of foreign aid, calling the notion “outrightly foolish” and “extraordinarily disagreeable.” The former Arkansas governor, also an ordained Baptist preacher, went on to say that not taking action to help those living in poverty around the world “would be un-Christian.”

HUCKABEE: I resent the idea that the conservative viewpoint somehow is at odds with the idea of strategic investment in countries around the globe. I not only disagree with it, I find it extraordinarily disagreeable. [...] To be honest with you, you go to a lot of political rallies, you can get an applause that will raise the roof if you just say, “we’re going to get rid of all foreign aid. We’re going to cut it all.” But it’s shortsighted if not outrightly foolish.

The simple reality is that every time America is making its presence known in any government across the world, it will be far more effective when it delivers bread than when it delivers bombs. And the next thing I think we ought to do, if we really are the Christians we claim to be, is to want to make sure that we do not turn our backs on the suffering we see. [...] As as a Christian believer myself, it would be impossible for me to have read the gospels of Jesus, to look upon a scene like that and not be moved to the point of action, and to just simply be moved to the point of compassion that did not result in doing something, would be un-Christian.

Watch the highlights from Huckabee’s remarks:

Gingrich spoke at the event immediately following Huckabee, but did not address the former Arkansas governor’s comments or his opposition to foreign aid. Gingrich instead claimed that preparing for an electromagnetic pulse attack — what scientists and nuclear experts dismiss as “far-fetched” — was a good use of American resources.

Today at a town hall event in South Carolina, a voter asked Newt Gingrich if he would ever consider supporting a Muslim-American for president. The former House speaker said he would, but under one condition:

Q: Would you as Newt Gingrich support a Muslim-American running for president. Would you endorse at one point in the future in American history that a Muslim-American could possibly be running for president given that we had a woman running for president in Hillary Clinton and we had a Jewish-American in Joe Lieberman for vice president.

GINGRICH: I think it would depend entirely on whether they would commit in public to give up Sharia. I am totally opposed to Sharia law being accepted by any court in the United States. In fact I favor a federal law that preempts it and says Sharia law will not be used in any court in the United States.

Watch the clip:

So it would appear that for Gingrich, every Muslim-American is potentially a proponent of Sharia law. Would Gingrich apply this condition to others? Would a candidate from another religion have to publicly denounce extremists that claim to adhere to that particular faith?

The so-called Sharia threat or “creeping Sharia” is a canard trumped up by Islamophobes who are trying to cast suspicion on the presence of all Muslims in America. As the ACLU noted, “there is no evidence that Islamic law is encroaching on our courts.” And Newt might have some problems with that federal law banning Sharia law. Just last week, a federal court struck down Oklahoma’s ban on Sharia law, declaring that the state’s move violated the United States Constitution.

British Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg rebuked Israel for its settlement policies, warning that continued settlement construction undermines the Middle East peace process. Clegg, speaking alongside Mahmoud Abbas, the president of the Palestinian Authority, yesterday in London, warned Israel that:

The continued existence of illegal settlements risks making facts on the ground such that a two-state solution becomes unviable. And that in turn will do absolutely nothing, nothing to safeguard the security of Israel itself and of Israeli citizens. [...] It’s an act of deliberate vandalism to the basic premise upon which negotiations have taken place for years and years and years.

Watch it:

Clegg’s boss, British Prime Minister David Cameron echoed his deputy’s comments after a meeting with Abbas yesterday, saying:

We think that time, in some ways, is running out for the two-state solution unless we can push forward now, because otherwise the facts on the ground will make it more and more difficult, which is why the settlement issue remains so important.

Indeed, the Obama administration also supports a settlement freeze but ended efforts to pressure the Israelis to do so just over a year ago. The White House and State Department criticize Israeli settlement expansion in East Jerusalem and the West Bank.

The Palestinian Authority refuses to return to formal peace talks until Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s imposes a freeze on settlement construction. But Netanyahu maintains that Abbas’ request for a halt to settlement construction is an example of Palestinians “thinking they [can] impose preconditions upon us,” before resuming formal negotiations. West Bank settlements have grown dramatically over the past decade. Between 1999 and 2010, settler populations in the West Bank nearly doubled, ballooning from 177,411 to 314,132.

Texas Gov. and fledgling GOP presidential candidate Rick Perry made the most stunning pronouncement of last night’s South Carolina Republican primary debate: Asked if Turkey should be kicked out of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), Perry said, “Obviously when you have a country that is being ruled by what many would perceive to be Islamic terrorists, when you start seeing that type of activity against their own citizens, then, yes.” Perry went on to group the NATO ally — meaning that if someone attacks Turkey, the U.S. must respond — together with U.S. adversaries. He referred to “countries like Iran, and Syria and Turkey.”

The media both in the U.S. and Turkey reacted with incredulity. “You couldn’t make this stuff up,” wrote the New Yorker’s John Cassidy. A Turkish columnist called Perry an “idiot.” CNN’s fact-checking operation said Perry’s claim that Turkey is run by “Islamic terrorists” was “false.”

But the most geo-strategically significant fallout from Perry’s comments may have come from Turkey itself. Turkey’s foreign ministry released a statement on Perry’s remarks, reported the AP:

Turkey joined NATO while the governor was still 2-years old. It is a member that has made important contributions to the trans-Atlantic alliance‘s conflict-full history. It is among countries that are at the front lines in the fight against terrorism. [...]

Figures who are candidates for positions that require responsibility, such as the U.S. presidency, should be more knowledgeable about the world and exert more care with their statement.

The foreign ministry also took a dig at Perry’s low polling numbers in the primary race, citing them as a repudiation of his views on Turkey among Americans.

Here are a few — of many — items demonstrating, contra Islamophobic hyperventilation, neoconservative proclamations, and the opinions of some House Democrats, Turkey’s commitment to the alliance with NATO and the U.S.:

Turkish troops fight alongside U.S. troops in Afghanistan, running reconstruction projects and training Afghan forces.

Turkey bankrolled the U.S.- and NATO-backed rebel forces that ousted Muammar Gaddafi from power in Libya.

Turkey agreed recently to host a U.S. missile defense radar installation, drawing the ire of Iran.

Turkey works the levers of diplomacy tirelessly to avert a military confrontation between the West and Iran over the latter’s nuclear program, recently extracting a statement from Iranian officials that the issue can be resolved through diplomacy.

Perry’s camp later walked back his statement, adding that the governor “would welcome the opportunity to work with Turkey on regional issues like Syria or Iraq.” But, judging from the Turkish foreign ministry’s statement, that sort of cooperation with a future Perry administration may already be off the table.

GOP presidential candidates and Republican pundits are eager to accuse the White House of being insufficiently tough with Iran. News that Israel and the U.S. canceled a planned joint military exercise set off speculation that the move reflected a desire of the Obama administration to tamp down friction with Iran. Indeed, the past week has brought a spike in tensions after the assassination of another Iranian nuclear scientist and published reports that agents with Israel’s Mossad spy agency posed as CIA operatives to recruit members of the Jundallah terrorist network to stage attacks against Iran.

But while the right wing repeats the claim that Obama projects American “weakness” abroad, the administration found an unlikely defender in Nicholas Burns, a career Foreign Service officer and the United States Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs during the George W. Bush administration, who responded to former House Speaker Newt Gingrich’s recent claim that cancellation of the joint military exercises is “the biggest act of weakness by any American president in my lifetime.” Burns responded in an interview with Andrea Mitchell yesterday on MSNBC:

BURNS: President Obama has essentially followed President Bush’s policy towards Iran in President Bush’s second term. [...] I think President Obama has tried to negotiate with Iran but he’s been very tough with Iran and pushing increasingly tough sanctions on them. In fact, President Obama just announced sanctions on Iran’s central bank. President Obama has not taken the military option off the table. So it’s an extreme exaggeration, in fact it’s just plain wrong to say somehow he’s weak in the face of this challenge.

I would say President Obama has been responsible for garnering a greater measure of international support for what we’re trying to do and I think Iran is probably more isolated today than the day that President Obama took office.

Watch it:

The GOP will, no doubt, continue to challenge Obama’s Iran strategy. But the reality, as Burns points out, is that the Obama administration has brought unprecedented multilateral pressure on Iran to fully cooperate with the IAEA. GOP attacks on Obama’s foreign policy have clearly gotten too detached from reality when a Bush administration under secretary of state is stepping up to defend the Obama administration’s record.

Our guest blogger is Laura Heaton, the writer-editor for the blog, Enough Said.

NAIROBI, Kenya — Kenya’s landmark incursion into Somalia last October and ongoing military operations present some important opportunities and disquieting potential pitfalls for establishing lasting security in a region controlled by the al Qaeda-linked jihadi group al-Shabaab.

The nearly three-month long intervention is the Kenyan army’s first-ever offensive across its borders. The commotion after Kenyan soldiers crossed over into Somalia and, reportedly, then sought approval from the Somalia’s transitional federal government compounded questions about the army’s experience. It also accentuated concerns about upsetting the fragile arrangements that have enabled Kenya to, for the most part, avoid being a target of Shabaab’s deadly attacks.

But beyond the viability of the military campaign to rout a brutal militant group that has employed devastating insurgency tactics against peacekeepers and soldiers more familiar with the terrain, the question of what comes next looms even larger.

“Intervention strategies that plan the war but not the peace will fail,” Somalia expert Ken Menkhaus warned in a policy paper published last Friday by the Enough Project.

“Indifference to or wishful thinking about the crafting of a post-intervention political order guarantees disorder, and can leave both the occupied country and the intervening power worse off than before.”

The stakes of the military operation against Shabaab this time around cannot be overstated. If the current campaign fails to dramatically undercut −− if not wholly defeat−− Shabaab, the situation will be even worse, as a longtime Somalia watcher here remarked to Enough recently: “Shabaab will look invincible.”

The responsibility for coming up with the post-intervention plan lies squarely with Somali leaders and authorities but will require strong diplomatic efforts and coordination by international partners, wrote Menkhaus, a professor at Davidson College. In particular, non-Somali actors must press for a governing plan that does not see the potential prizes of the operation against Shabaab −− most significantly, the lucrative and hotly contested port city of Kismayo −− divvied up along clan lines. Menkhaus explained: Read more

A consensus seems to be developing on Iran’s nuclear program among those hired by major news organizations to keep an eye on their own reporting. Much of the discussion so far has focused on the latest International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) report on Iran’s nuclear program, the most comprehensive publicly-available evidence on the issue. In the document, the IAEA expressed “serious concerns regarding possible military dimensions to Iran’s nuclear programme.” As a White House official said at the time, the IAEA report neither indicated that Iran has a nuclear weapons program nor that Tehran has made a decision to build a bomb.

A spate of ombudsmen and public editors of major news organizations have come out and bolstered the more accurate reading of the IAEA report — one that raises worries but does not conclude that Iran has a nuclear weapons program. First Washington Post ombud Patrick Pexton said so, urging extra caution because overstating evidence about the program can “play into the hands of those who are seeking further confrontation with Iran.” He was followed by New York Times public editor Arthur Brisbane, who wrote that hewing closely to available facts matters “because the Iranian program has emerged as a possible casus belli.” Now, they’re both being joined by Edward Schumacher-Matos, National Public Radio’s ombudsman, and Public Broadcasting System (PBS) ombudsman Michael Getler.

Responding to reader complaints, some from a letter-writing campaign, Schumacher-Matos addressed an NPR story that referred to Iran’s “nuclear weapons program.” Discussing the IAEA report and the story, he wrote:

It was the closest the UN agency had come to saying that Iran was engaged in a nuclear weapons program, but still stopped short of saying that the country actually had one. The NPR story in wording and in tone accurately reflected this position.

Shorthand references are often dangerous in journalism, and listeners are correct to be on the alert for them. Repeated enough as fact—”Iran’s nuclear weapons program”—they take on a life of their own.

According to [NPR senior editor for national security Bruce] Auster, NPR’s policy is to refer in shorthand to Iran’s “nuclear program” and not “nuclear weapons program.” This is a correct formula, it seems to me, in part because Iran has proudly announced its nuclear program — while asserting it is for “peaceful” purposes, not for making weapons.

Though the NPR piece in question referred in one instance to Iran’s “nuclear weapons program,” Schumacher-Matos noted that, when taken in context and observing the entire story, the item described Iran’s nuclear program in the measured way described by NPR’s ombud-approved guidelines. Therefore, NPR issued no correction and the ombudsman didn’t call for one.

Separately, PBS faced criticism from the left-leaning media watchdog Fairness and Accuracy In Reporting (FAIR) over one of its reports. Ombudsman Michael Getler wrote in response, “I think FAIR makes a good journalistic catch,” but denied FAIR’s contention that an edit in the piece was “dishonest.” In Gelter’s column, PBS NewsHour Foreign Affairs and Defense Editor Mike Mosettig wrote that it’s “clear from what we did air, that Iran is not at this moment putting a bomb together.”