(Jpost, Jacob Kornbluh).Republican candidates offered strong words on Iran on Monday – the day before Iowa holds the first vote for the GOP presidential nomination.
“We need to have our missile systems capable and ready to deliver. We need to send a very strong signal that the United States is on high alert and we will do whatever it takes,” Rep. Michele Bachmann of Minnesota told The Early Show on CBS.
“What we need to do is take a very aggressive posture toward letting Iran know that we mean business, that we don’t want them to seek a nuclear weapon,” she said.
Bachmann also criticized US President Barack Obama for putting distance between America and Israel, endangering the Jewish state in the face of the threat from Iran.
Bachmann’s comments followed Rick Santorum’s own harsh comments on Iran on Sunday. The former US senator from Pennsylvania told NBC’s Meet the Press that the message to Tehran should be, “You either open up those facilities, you begin to dismantle them and make them available to inspectors, or we will degrade those facilities through air strikes.”
Campaigning across the State of Iowa, Mitt Romney opened every rally speech On Iran. Romney said recent news that the hostile nation has developed a nuclear rod and tested a surface-to-air missile points to a failed U.S. foreign policy. "He said he was going to engage Iran. ... Well, we now know how well that engagement policy worked. What's happened is those crippling sanctions never got put in place. When voices of dissent went to the street, he was silent. When the people of Iran wondered if there was an American military option that was being considered, it was clear that that was not something that was on the table."