During Saturday night’s ABC/Yahoo! Republican presidential debate, former U.S. ambassador to China Jon Huntsman rapped former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney on failing to recognize the chain-of-command of the U.S. military. By design, the military leadership is subservient to the president, a fact most GOP contenders have ignored throughout the campaign as they sought to portray Barack Obama as weak on national security.

Romney has, as on so many issues, flip-flopped on whether or not a president should defer to his generals in making decisions about war and peace. Initially, he said Obama should defer to military leaders, then walked his position back and said he would listen to the generals’ “input” and make his “own decision.” During Saturday’s debate, Romney didn’t quite return to his initial position, but he did punctuate his statement on a plan for Afghanistan by declaring that he would be “listening to the commanders on the ground.”

Asked to respond, Huntsman, who’s spoken out for a more speedy withdrawal from Afghanistan, lept at the opportunity:

MODERATOR: Governor Huntsman, you have a disagreement?

HUNTSMAN: Yes. I would have to tell Mitt that the president of the United States is the commander-in-chief. Of course you get input and — and advice from a lot of different corners of Washington, including the commanders on the ground.

But we also deferred to the commanders on the ground in about 1967, during the Vietnam War, and we didn’t get very good advice then.

Watch a video of the exchange:

The U.S.’s top military officer, Joint Chiefs of Staff chairman Martin Dempsey, and other top generals agree with Huntsman. “I find some of those articles about divergence or control of the generals to be kind of offensive to me,” Dempsey recently said. “(A)t the end of the day, our system is built on the fact that it will be our civilian leaders who make that decision and I don’t find that in any way to challenge my manhood, nor my position. In fact, if it were the opposite, I think we should all be concerned.”

Huntsman concluded his comments on Saturday by declaring that “civil war is around the corner in Afghanistan.” He said he doesn’t want to spend more money or lose more troops in that scenario and the U.S. should “move on.”

Former House speaker and GOP presidential hopeful Newt Gingrich said during Saturday’s ABC News/Yahoo News Republican debate that Palestinians are “terrorists.” The comment came after Gingrich was asked about his statement in the days leading up to the debate that Palestinians are an “invented” people. The comment set off a firestorm of criticism, including by establishment Middle East figures, and Gingrich’s campaign told the New York Times on Saturday that the candidate supported the two-state solution to end the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

But asked about the comments by ABC’s George Stephanopoulos before a debate crowd later that night, Gingrich didn’t back away from the comment and doubled down on his Palestinian-bashing:

GINGRICH: Is what I said factually correct? Yes. Is it historically true? Yes. Are we in a situation where every day rockets are fired into Israel while the United States — the current administration tries to pressure the Israeli’s into a peace process? [...]

Somebody ought to have the courage to tell the truth. These people are terrorists. They teach terrorism in their schools. They have textbooks that say, if there are 13 Jews and nine Jews are killed, how many Jews are left? We pay for those textbooks through our aid money. It’s fundamentally time for somebody to have the guts to stand up and say, enough lying about the Middle East.

After Gingrich’s remarks were greeted by a round of applause, former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney commented, “I happen to agree with most of the Speaker said, except by going out and saying the Palestinians are an invented people.” Romney then said that Gingrich might feel the same, that it was a “mistake” to say Palestinians are “invented.” Gingrich then shook his head in disagreement. Watch the video of the full exchange:

As the New Yorker’s David Remnick points out, Gingrich’s claim that Palestinians are “invented” is not historically accurate, but rather was borne out of a long-since debunked piece of “propaganda.”

And while the Hamas organization and political party that seized the Gaza Strip by force in 2007 in a pre-emptive counter-coup is listed by the U.S. State Department as a foreign terror organization, the Palestinian Liberation Organization and its constituent Fatah party that rules the Palestinian authority are not considered terrorists by the U.S.

Romney could have been reflecting on the breadth of Gingrich’s comments when he said he agrees with the former Speaker. While he should be given credit for repudiating the line about “invented” people, enterprising reporters should nonetheless ask for a clarification from Romney and his campaign as to whether he agrees with Gingrich’s statement that “These people [Palestinians] are terrorists.”

After the conclusion of Tuesday night’s GOP national security and foreign policy debate, CNN Democratic political analyst Donna Brazile remarked that the debate seemed like a bad flashback:

This was like retro debate. I felt like we were going back into the past. The neocons — it was like the last hurrah, celebration of the past. Not looking at the current threats and the way the president has handled them and perhaps how we handle future threats to this country.

Brazile is right: Despite the rise of the Tea Party, with its disdain for government, and libertarian non-interventionist Rep. Ron Paul’s (R-TX) primacy in important Republican races, the GOP seems inextricably wedded to the foreign policy ethos that defined the first George W. Bush term.

Last night’s debate was hosted by two think tanks with close links to the personnel and ideology of the Bush Administration. Most of the “audience questions” came from scholars from the organizations, the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) and the Heritage Foundation. The latter, though not as renown for militaristic neoconservatism as the former, nonetheless advocates many similar positions, such as robust defense spending levels, continuing large-scale military commitments in the Middle East and Central Asia, hawkishness on Iran and unflinching support for Israeli government policies.

The Bush foreign policy era connections were on full display last night, despite the fact that Bush himself was barely mentioned. The former president’s unpopularity in the waning days of his administration may be the reason he’s barely been mentioned. In the ten previous debates, Bush one came up only 19 times, most of them critical mentions, according to an analysis by Michael Cohen. Last night, Bush got two shout-outs, both of them from “audience questions” from top former Bush administration officials.

Those officials, and the think tankers that cheered on the administration, featured prominently in the debate. Here’s a quick run-down of some of the most controversial ones and what they asked about:

DAVID ADDINGTON: The Heritage staffer, former top aide to Vice President Dick Cheney and co-author of the infamous “torture memos,” asked about Syria and what the candidates thought constituted U.S. interests, and “what would you do to protect them.”

DANIELLE PLETKA: The vice president of foreign policy and defense studies at AEI and wife of Romney campaign staffer Stephen Rademaker, Pletka held to her longstanding hawkishness on Iran, positing that “Iran is probably less than a year away from getting a nuclear weapon” and wondering if sanctions could bring an end to Iran’s nuclear program.

EDWIN MEESE III: The former Reagan administration Attorney General and Heritage fellow asked, “Shouldn’t we have a long range extension of the investigative powers contained in [the Patriot Act]?”

MARC THIESSEN: A speechwriter for the Bush White House and Donald Rumsfeld‘s Defense Department who advocates relentlessly for permissive interrogation guidelines — ie. torture — the AEI fellow asked what national security issue the candidates thought was going unmentioned but that loomed on the horizon.

PAUL WOLFOWITZ: The AEI scholar and, at the Bush Pentagon, a key architect of the Iraq war, asked if the foreign development aid levels of the Bush administration were possible to attain in the age of austerity.

FRED KAGAN: The AEI scholar and Iraq war dead-ender asked: “Do you think that an expanded drone campaign in Pakistan would be sufficient to defeat al-Qaeda and to secure our interests in Pakistan?”

The Washington Post ThinkTanked blog wondered yesterday if two think-tanks which are closely affiliated with some of the candidates and their hawkish advisers can host an unbiased debate. But journalist Max Blumenthal asked if the bigger issue wasn’t whether a “news network… has handed control over its campaign coverage” to ideological neoconservatives. It seems, though, from watching the debate, that the GOP also acquiesces to a strong neoconservative influence over its foreign policies. If the party retakes the presidency, which controls foreign affairs, the U.S. seems likely to return to the aggressive policies of the first Bush term.