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Republicans Get Wonkinsh on Foreign Policy

7:28 PM, Jan 5, 2008 • By MICHAEL GOLDFARB
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John Podhoretz is liveblogging the debate over at Contentions:

My word. Mitt Romney not only mentioned meeting with Fred Kagan, one of the architects of the surge and a COMMENTARY contributor, but even brought in the name of radical Islamic theorist Sayyid Qutb. So one can believe him when he told Mike Huckabee he actually read Huckabee's article about foreign policy in Foreign Affairs, about which Huckabee expressed skepticism on the debate stage. Perhaps that's because since Huckabee surely didn't write it, he couldn't imagine any of the other candidates might actually have read it.

Kagan is also a frequent WEEKLY STANDARD contributor, for the record, but did Huckabee call out the year Qutb was executed (1966) without Romney saying it first? I hadn't started recording it yet, and I must have tuned out for a second. But it sounded like Huckabee just pulled that date out of the thin air. If he did, it's pretty impressive for a guy who everyone assumes is out of his depth on such issues (see above).

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