In last night’s GOP presidential debate on CNN, moderator John King allowed a viewer to introduce a topic bedeviling U.S. foreign policy at the moment — Iran’s nuclear program. With war chatter on the rise, top U.S. officials have injected their opinions into the public debate.

Joint Chiefs Chairman Gen. Martin Dempsey said on Sunday that an Israeli attack on Iran was “not prudent at this point” and that such a strike would be “destabilizing and wouldn’t achieve [Israel's] long-term objectives.” When King asked Newt Gingrich if, as president, he would take Dempsey’s advice, the former House Speaker dismissed the U.S.’s top military officer opinion, saying he “can’t imagine why” Dempsey holds some of his views:

GINGRICH: Well, first of all this is two different questions. General Dempsey went on to say that he thought Iran was a rational actor. I can’t imagine why he would say that. And I just cannot imagine why he would have said it. The fact is, this is a dictator, Ahmadinejad, who has said he doesn’t believe the Holocaust existed. This is a dictator who said he wants to eliminate Israel from the face of the earth. This is a dictator who said he wants to drive the United States out of the Middle East. I’m inclined to believe dictators. Now I — I think that it’s dangerous not to.

Watch a video of King’s question and Gingrich’s full answer:

Dempsey’s views track with those of the U.N. nuclear agency and reported U.S. intelligence estimates, as well as the public testimony of the top U.S. intelligence official. On Capitol HIll last month, Director of National Intelligence James Clapper said of Iran’s nuclear program: “They are certainly moving on that path, but we don’t believe they’ve actually made the decision to go ahead with a nuclear weapon.”

Not only does Gingrich dismiss the opinion of the top American military officer, but he also badly misstates Iranian political dynamics. On NPR this morning, Mehdi Khalaji — an actual Iran expert with the Washington Institute for Near East Policy — pointed out that Iran’s actual dictator is not President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Instead, Iran is lead by a Supreme Leader, who holds the office for life and makes many of the state’s final decisions. Khalaji said:

The main decision maker on crucial issues, including the nuclear program, is Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran’s Supreme Leader. … We have to bear in mind that he’s not only Iran’s supreme leader, he’s the commander-in-chief of the armed forces.

Khalaji’s latter comment means that Ahmadinejad cannot start a war — with Israel or anybody else — and that responsibility rests instead with the Supreme Leader.

If Gingrich wants to “listen to dictators” in order to justify his hawkish views, he should be free to do so. But it’s disconcerting that he doesn’t even know who the dictator is that he should be listening to.

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.

Amid the talk during Tuesday night’s Republican presidential debate about negotiating with terrorists like al Qaeda, Rep. Ron Paul (R-TX) dropped a doozy on his fellow candidates: “Are you all willing to condemn Ronald Reagan for exchanging weapons for hostages out of Iran? We all know that was done.” One of the candidates, former Sen. Rick Santorum (R-PA), quickly stepped up to defend the Gipper:

SANTORUM: That’s not — Iran was a sovereign country. It was not a terrorist organization, number one.

[...] They’re — they’re — they’re a sovereign country…

PAUL: He negotiated for hostages.

SANTORUM: There’s — there’s a role — we negotiated for hostages with the Soviet Union. We’ve negotiated with hostages, depending on the scale. But there’s a difference between releasing terrorists from Guantanamo Bay in response to a terrorist demand… then — then negotiating with other countries, where we may have an interest, and that is certainly a proper role for the United States, too.

But just the following night on Fox News, Santorum was singing a different tune. Asked by Bret Baier what President Santorum’s Iran policy would be, the former senator concluded:

This government will not and cannot be negotiated with. They are radical Islamists. They are theocrats. They are mullahs who believe it is their destiny to fulfill the prophets and the 12th Imam’s vision of having global control of the world for radical Shia Islam.

Watch the video:

In the past, Santorum has called Iran “evil” and “Islamic fascists,” and in the same speech celebrated Reagan calling the Soviet Union the “evil empire.” At the debate Tuesday, he supported talking to both Iran and the Soviet Union as “proper” when there was a U.S. “interest” at stake. But when he wasn’t put in a position to defend Reagan’s actions, he leaned toward a more ideological position that precludes any talking irrespective of national interests.